17:48:29 - Comments (View)
text, swine flu, ranting, health, media, news, hypocrisy, sensationalism,
Now here’s a shocker: remember that 6 year-old girl who died last week, supposedly of swine flu? You know, this one.
And how the media crowed that she was healthy and only died because of swine flu and not being given Tamiflu quickly enough? And that therefore we were all doomed, doomed, DOOMED?
Yeah, well, she died of a combination of tonsilitis and septic shock, the post mortem has revealed. There’s a real fucking surprise.
Now, I really, genuinely don’t mean to sound callous about this. I wrote at the time that it was a tragedy for the family involved, and I still stand by that.
What I was angry about was the saturation media coverage her death created. Seriously, loads of that day’s front pages were about her and how she was healthy before swine flu “killed” her. Are we going to see the same coverage tomorrow? Are we balls.
This is the kind of thing that really, really annoys me about the media. They love to splash with huge, scaremongering front pages and headlines, yet when those stories are proved false and/or overblown, that barely merits a mention on page 94.
Hell, the BBC and Sky News websites both currently have a ticker about another girl who has died in hospital because of swine flu. At least the BBC is acknowledging that she had an underlying condition, but it is still being reported as if swine flu killed her.
I said it last week, and I’ll say it again: it is an unfortunate fact that the disease affects the infirm, elderly and very young proportionately more severely than the average healthy person.
Yet each and every death is being treated as if we are one step closer to the apocalypse. It’s poor journalism, completely sensationalist and it’s having the effect of scaring the general populace so much so that our health services are being overwhelmed by people who just need to take some paracetamol and watch some shitty films from their sofas for a couple of days.
