On Wednesday, The New York Times published a story about the public becoming panicked by media coverage of the swine flu pandemic.
“Without the news media,” the story said, “the public would be dangerously unaware of the swine flu outbreak, but perhaps without saturation coverage on cable news networks and the velocity of information on the Internet, the public would not be so hysterical, medical professionals said.”
Protecting the public from saturation coverage may be one way to prevent hysteria. A far better way would be to provide the public with the power of media literacy. If the public knew how the media worked, in providing both essential and saturation coverage, they could rely not on protection, but their own understanding of media, in dealing with the coverage of a huge story. They would be empowered to receive essential information and non-essential information, be able to tell the two apart, and know how to react to it. How powerful an improvement would that be?
Here is a definition, used daily by media professionals, that makes the swine flu story so big. It is the definition of news: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo, or the way things are. The epidemic has begun and spread to a global level, which is a terrific change to the status quo. But look at the second part of the definition, the threat to the status quo. In the swine flu story, no one, from global leaders to heads of households, knows what is going to happen. This threat to the status quo – not knowing what is going to happen – truly makes the story as big as it is, both to media professionals and in the public mind.
So that is the way the story is reported: here’s where we are, but what happens next? This is not the media trying to scare people; it is the media reporting how scary things are, because of the threat. People have a total right to be scared, when a virus with original, unknown properties threatens to break free and roam the earth. Movies are made about such circumstances. Speaking of which, this very day, dozens of writers and producers, believe me, are busily collecting swine flu material, with just such a project in mind.
Is this cynical, or unethical? If it is, then why was there such mourning at the loss of Michael Crichton, a master at fictionalizing the threat to the status quo? In fact Americans love the threat to the status quo, which drives almost exclusively two of the leading media businesses, sports and weather. The threat also drives most novels, movies, soap operas and sitcoms consumed by Americans.
The threat is also a strong temptation to cable news producers battling for viewership in a cutthroat-competitive 24/7 television world. So Fox News Channel, to promote its newscast, airs a commercial saying “swine flu plagues the nation.” Of course Fox shouldn’t be doing this, but the only party with any control over such manipulation is the public. Media literacy would empower the public to recognize the line not as a call to alarm, but as a marketing hook, giving people a better chance to make the viewing choice they would feel good about.
As ever, the ultimate irony inherent in this kind of discussion is the origin of the definition of news, and the other values and definitions that media professionals use in their work, whether it’s news, entertainment or advertising. The media didn’t create these values and definitions; the people did. They don’t realize it, and should be made aware of it starting in, say, third grade. You’d be amazed how much media literacy people can acquire in a single semester, if only educators decided to teach it to them.
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