Alright. First of all, fuck the media for completely blowing this whole thing out of proportion and scaring the hell out of people. Seriously, every single time I visit the NY Times website, there’s some new update about the flu and how it’s spreading or some shit. They even have a section devoted to swine flu coverage!

There are a few things that the media seems to be overlooking in their rush to sensationalize this story.

#1) Swine flu is an influenza virus. It is not ebola. Millions of people die from the flu every year, most of them are either elderly, infirm, or very young (infants). People who are fit and generally in good health typically do not die from the flu.

#2) All the cases of death from swine flu have been in Mexico. There have been no deaths in the U.S as of this moment (and don’t try and count that story about the little boy in Texas that the NY Times was talking about. He came to the U.S from Mexico to get treatment.) Has no one taken the time to consider the differences between environments here? Mexico City, where most of the cases originated, is one of the most polluted cities in the world. People who live there are at a significantly higher risk for developing respiratory illnesses and other diseases than in most other places where the virus has been reported.

Also, there’s a good article in WSJ about why the death rate is so high in Mexico. The virus is apparently the same strain in Mexico as in the U.S, so it seems pretty likely that the virus’s lethality is from poor health care.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124096777126666585.html

I’m tired of this sort of crap. The media just loves to talk about things that scare people. I was reading an article in the Record the other day about the journalism panel that was here last week, and I saw a quote that really made me laugh. One older gentlemen on the panel rhetorically asked (i don’t remember exactly) “why don’t young people care about the news anymore?” I almost laughed milk out of my nose.

Why don’t people care about the news? Because it’s full of HORSESHIT! Because it’s turned into a sideshow for entertainment and amusement! Because it knows that the only way it can improve its readership or ratings is to fucking terrify people! I don’t want all this bullshit from the media. In fact, I don’t want anything from them anymore. Unless some really serious shit goes down, they need to drop this story, because it’s only scaring people and it’s pissing me off.

Indeed. But Jason Rapaport seems to misunderstand just what business the media is in. Asking them not to stoke hysteria is like asking amusement park operators to operate their roller coasters at 10 MPH. In both cases, that’s not what the customer wants. The customer wants to be scared. Don’t blame the New York Times. Blame all your the Williams students, faculty and alumni who are spending so much more time reading about swine flu, either via the web or on TV.