Friday, August 13, 2010

Here we go again: another idiotic media scare

A new bacteria is poised to become the Next Big Fake Thing perpetrated on the public by the press. The so-called superbug is being called NDM-1. And the Fox News headline is true to form for how the media handles items like this:

New Drug-Resistant 'Superbug' Claims First Life

Read that headline very carefully, will ya? One guy, out of some six billion in the world, has died from a tough little bacteria. Not newsworthy, but the wording of the headline makes it newsworthy.

For those keeping score, here's my list of media scares:

Y2K - the former undisputed heavyweight champ

Global cooling

Global warming - defeated Y2K for the biggest non-story in history

SARs

Bird flu

Foot and mouth disease

Mad cow disease

Swine flu / H1N1 - a flue that was as mild as seasonal flu and not more infectious somehow was labeled a pandemic and caused Mexicans to be quarantined in some Asian countries all because of the media, not reality

Acid rain

Overpopulation

Hurricane Katrina - even a genuine disaster had to be exaggerated all out of proportion; inaccurate outbursts by single sources were often reported as fact in newspapers across the country

Unintended acceleration, Audi

Unintended acceleration, the sequel, Toyota

Am I missing any?

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