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Watching Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, try to school Kira Phillips of CNN about the misperceptions that are being planted by calling the new flu "swine" flu is truly a headshaker.
After methodically going through point by point that this flu is not food-borne, it is airborne, Vilsack notes that it is safe to eat pork chops, he ate pork for breakfast. That calling it swine flu creates false fears in people’s minds.
The minute the segment ended, Kira was right back to calling it swine flu. As the chyron always did. Every other sentence seems to be swine flu, swine flu. They have their script of the day and they’re not budging.
And CNN is not alone in this. After reporting Tuesday that the administration had requested that the flu be called N1H1 flu (admittedly a cumbersome name), Brian Williams and the medical correspondent went out of their way to repeat "swine" flu over and over throughout the newscast.
Is this the way it’s gonna be? We’re still in the schoolyard with the petulant, lazy media incapable of revising and updating their coverage? Because it’s "out there"? Cokie Rules still apply?
You’d think they would’ve remembered how they got it wrong in the Oklahoma City bombing coverage blaming Arab terrorists.
Give the media Grade D- on this one…until they provide reasonable public health information without the hyperventilating hysterical hoo-hah that they’ve pegged their reporting to thus far.
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crossposted at Prairie Sun Rising
1 Comment
Monsanto Tom may be correct on what to name this although there may be a connection to factory hog farms. But he is dead wrong about how to solve world hunger. Recently he is pushing the awful GM seeds for international security. From the Financial Times report on the G8 Ag Secretaries:
So while we are distracted by the flu, the Senate Foreign Relation Committee has devised a very cynical “Global Food Security Act” which would give 7.7 Billion to genetically modified seeds “research” for Africa. A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists say that these magic seeds don’t help yield and an UN study says that organic methods work better. But there is no money to be made on organic as opposed to patenting seeds.
Vilsack is on the wrong side of this and should be getting an earful. If Monsanto and Syngenta own most of the seeds in the world, how secure does that make the world’s people?