CE Week #10: “All the news that frightens”
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
November 4, 2007
You might want to wash your hands after reading this.
After all, many other folks touched this paper (or screen, as the case may be) before you, and you don’t know where their hands have been.
For all you know, the last person to touch the paper was carrying Entamoeba histolyca, a parasite that causes amebiasis. You could end up with stomach cramps, bloody stools and an abscess on your liver. And that’s assuming the disease doesn’t spread to your lungs and brain.
Or maybe the last person to use the computer recently came into contact with African green monkeys. You could contract Marburg hemorrhagic fever. It brings rash, vomiting, chills, chest pain, sore throat, fever and diarrhea. And jaundice, pancreatic inflammation and severe weight loss. And delirium and shock. And liver failure and multi-organ dysfunction. And then you might die.
You think I’m trying to scare you? You’re right. Why should I be the only journalist in America who isn’t?
Consider what happened about two weeks back when every news organization in the country suddenly, simultaneously, discovered that staph infections kill people.
You could not turn on the television or pick up any publication this side of TV Guide without encountering alarmist stories about Staphylococcus aureus. Like flocks of birds that turn in the same direction at the same time in response to some invisible stimulus, it was as if every news editor in the country got the same memo at the same time: this is staph week.
Most of the stories were about MRSA, i.e., Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a staph strain that does not respond to common antibiotics. This made the so-called “super-bug” a headline magnet.
You know how many times staph was mentioned in U.S. newspapers in the first two weeks of October? According to a computer search: 155. Know how many times it was mentioned between the 15th and the 31st? 1,650.
So did staph somehow become deadlier in the last two weeks than it was before? No.
“Staph is not new,” says Nicole Coffin, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “Even MRSA is not new. In the hospitals it’s been around for 30 years. In the general population, it’s been around for at least 10 years.”
According to Coffin, the media’s staph infection stemmed from a story in the Journal of the American Medical Association nearly a month ago. JAMA reported on a study that found there were 19,000 fatal MRSA infections in 2005.
The number was higher than researchers had expected. But even that comes with a caveat: researchers cautioned that the methodology they used was significantly different than that of earlier studies, so direct comparisons with earlier data are dicey.
Am I making light of staph? Far from it: One of my family had a serious bout with the infection just this year. So I’m not diminishing staph. I am, however, ridiculing media.
As in the people who bring us shark attacks! Poison gases in your home! Bacteria lurking in hotel sheets! The pedophile next door!
We live evermore in the United States of Fear. We are entertained by it. Titillated by it. Distracted by it.
And we have learned to move as media move, together like birds in a flock, attention changing constantly and for no apparent reason. Already, fear of staph is fading. Tomorrow there will be fear of something else.
Meanwhile, in other news, 47 million Americans have no health insurance, the number of hate groups in this country has risen by 40 percent in seven years, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to wash your hands.
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I, like my dad, have a general distrust of the media on about every subject they report. Because of this distrust I find myself really liking this article. Many people forget that the media is first and foremost a business to make money. They give what we want the most or, if they can’t do that, they will make a story that we can not tear ourselves away from. Take for example all of the medical threats that have popped up for the last four years. We had SARS scare which infected Asia. Then we had the avian bird flu that have evolved into a virus we had no cure for. Now we have the super staph infection that has grown immune to all of our antibiotics. Sounds kind of like a comic story line where a new foe has appeared with powers we cannot possibly counter. The day get saved the story ends and moves on to the next episode. After a while the comic, like the media, starts to have a repeating plot line when you look at the back issues. The villain has learned how to used mind control to take over the world!!!… wait didn’t that happen twenty five comics back? Looking at history there always has been some epidemic that has haunted us but the media has a habit of forgetting that there are a lots of epidemics that have come and gone. Ask your parents. I’m sure they can give you a long list.
“We live evermore in the United States of Fear.”
Forever I’ve had this opinion about our media in America. I quit watching the news on NBC, CBS, or even ABC because their main objective seems to be to strike fear into the hearts of their viewers, not really to bring them the news but to bring them the news that will shock and awe them, or in Brittany Spears case make them feel better about themselves. It’s interesting, as an experiment of sorts to watch a world news broadcast and see their different perspective on matters — what the world really cares about instead of our little pinhole into the world of news that we see everyday.
Back to Staph though. My mom’s a nurse, I hear about this kind of thing a lot in my house and it’s funny to hear about it from the perspective of those who actually understand the disease and how it spreads. The Mead School District website even has a link to the King County health departments website so concerned parents can go and look up all the facts about staph and how their kids can avoid it. But as this news reporter said it’s pretty simple, wash your hands. People haven’t been scared of getting staph for the past several years (most their entire lives I’d say) and now that there’s all this media around it they’ve become super concerned and if you haven’t had problems with it up until now I don’t see how changing your entire lifestyle is necessary.
First off, I want to say how well this article was written. I loved it. Definitely going in my favorites list for the evening.
As for his point, I agree with him wholeheartedly. The media tends to attack things, get the public all hyped up, then back off and let the issue stew for a while. There is a specific reason I don’t watch the television anymore. This is the one.
I hate the media. A lot.
All we hear is sickness, death, destruction, horrible acts against humanity…it all gets pretty tiresome and depressing after a while.
So when people like me, and Mr. Pitts Jr. up there, get sick of that sort of thing, we tend to bash.
And frankly, the media deserves it.
Once in a while, I would like to hear about the birthday of a baby panda in China, or something. Sheesh.
Two weeks ago, I was warned by one of the teachers about the “super-bug” and was told to wash my hands as much as I could – and to not share my toothbrush. My friends and I joked about it and for about a week after that, every time I washed my hands, I remembered about the “super-bug” and chuckled. And honestly, this article made me laugh. I mean, what else am I supposed to do? I don’t know whether to take something like that lightly or take it seriously.
I love how it took me a good ¾ of the way through the article to even see where Pitts was going. But I totally agree with what he was saying. We get so wrapped up in the media and pretty soon we fear everything possible. We hear about an infection that happened half way around the world and all of a sudden we take all precautionary measures. I’m not saying that washing your hands a few times each day is a bad thing, but I think that sometimes we go a little overboard.
Oh my gosh this is really true. It seems like the media will get a hold of anything they can and just run with it. remember bird flu? ABC even made a movie of how the country’s population was going to be demolished by this disease. and it turned out to kill about 5 people. I hate how the media causes so much fear in so many Americans over some disease they decide to write about. I wish the news could focus on an issue that is new and relevant to the times. I mean what is stopping the media from freaking out over AIDS and causing a nation wide panic. The media needs to stop fishing for ratings and trying to be the first on the story because this is a direct product of that. People panic and continue to watch to see new developments causing a higher rating for that station. This article does a really good job of exposing this and showing that staph is not new. There has to be one station out there that will really research something of major importance and report it. because if they’re going to report something like this, they might as well not report anything at all.
I’ve read quite a few of this writer’s articles and usually I do not agree with him. However, this article was brilliant! I loved it. The media is seriously retarded and there are all too many Americans that believe everything it says, not taking “spin” into account or fallacy of exclusion. In this article Pitts said that staph infections that kill have been in existance for quite a long time they just haven’t been brought to light. The media just decided to make a big hype about it and most of the public was caught in it. How dumb is that? Why did the media decide to bring this up now? I believe everything is done for a reason, so there must have been another motive for this. Is it because health care is a big topic in the upcoming presidencial elections and this would bring more attention to the topic? There are numerous reasons why this subject was recently brought up. But, the point is, this just shows that the media can manipulate the public very easily to their advantage. It’s truly sad that Americans are that dumb. Why trust the media? This just shows that we all need to question everything. Why follow something blindly? It could be the downfall of our country in the long run. More uneducated people that do not care.
America is consumed by the media. They tell us what to worry about and when to worry about it. Maybe next week they will tell us to fear tooth cavities. They have always existed and they have always led to the same health problems. If that happens, I’m that sure that like staph, every newspaper will publish articles on the threats of cavities. Why should every newspaper publish articles on an issue that has been around for forever? It’s alright if a few newspapers publish information, but every single one? What Pitts Jr. is trying to get us to realize through his article is that people need to focus on the important and recent issues, not just the ones that are ongoing. We cannot fear things that are not going to change- it will not do us any good. We should be focusing on the facts that, “47 million Americans have no health insurance, the number of hate groups in this country has risen 40 percent in seven years, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.” The media should put information out on issues that are relevant to the times and they should focus on giving out unbiased news. The media needs to rely on America’s fears less.
This article has brought up a very good point. For years I have been complaining about the medias use of fear to gain the publics attention. I think that this article, although I do not necessarily agree with all the parts and points, shed an interesting light on that topic.
As much as I hate articles that scare the public into taking action, and not necesarily with all the facts, this article makes me really think. At first I thought it was only going to be a piece about health issues, then staph infections, and then it throws that little twist in there at the end about using fear and how this article IS doing that.
I knew staph was serious, I never really thought about it killing people, although I guess I knew it can. I had a friend who had bad scars on her arm from a staph infection and when I told my dad I think I remember him telling me about how serious it was and how she could have died from an infection.
It seems terrible although I don’t really know anything in medical terms about staph infections, ecept that they are infections and they are serious.
But with the twist at the end we discover that this article isn’t really about staph infections. It’s about fear. How the media uses fear as an aspect of control over the masses.
So take everything you read with a grain of salt, even this article.
I think that this whole thing about trying to strike fear in Americans is just stupid. Can our media not focus on anything else and try to get some other kind of story that could catch our attention and maybe get us up in arms about something that actually matters? It seems to me that it may not necessarily be the media though. If the media can’t get people to tune into their stories about the war and other actual pressing matters, such as governmental issues and world issues, maybe it is our society that is the problem. For some reason, the only thing that seems to strike interest in American’s, is dramatic stories that could possibly affect their lives, such as MRSA. When one small story is let out to the media everyone acts so shocked and tries to make a big deal about it. The reality of Staph infections that are going around is that people really don’t have to do anything different than they have in the past. Simply wash your hands and be cautious of the things you come in contact with. I don’t see why people had to get so obsessed with it when it really wasn’t that big of a deal. I think that the media should start to move away from all the stories that are just trying to put fear into American’s and start focusing on the issues that actually matter, that won’t cause people to panic. Maybe if the media can move towards this, our society could move toward not being obsessed with the stories that are so dramatic.
I must say though…I do like the moist towelettes the school has started handing out during lunch!
The media will always spin everything with thier secret intent in mind. No matter what, one will never always get 100% unbias news. The fact that spin doctors even exist and have jobs proves that it is pointless to even begin to expect some straight forward news. It is amazing how craved newspapers and media outlets are for as much attention as possible, that they jump on such a huge bandwagon all at the same time. It seems to me that just the opposite would get them more attention. If their news was on different stuff than everyone else- that way it wouldn’t be so monotonous. This new “Super Bug” or Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus is just the newest deadly disease that has killed a few people, and that the media decides to blow it up into a huge issue and act like it has the potential to kill all 300 million of us (of course that is not realistic, but you get my point.) I cant think of a better reason to report these stories rather than to get more attention, and if that is what the media has come to, their sole purpose is to get as many viewers, readers, and supporters as possible, then this situation really sucks. Oh wait! that is what the media is like and the situation really does suck. Whaddayaknow!
I personally, thought this opinion article was really quite interesting and, unfortunately, completely true. As we have talked about in class with the media, “if it bleeds it leads” and it is so true. The media uses any source it really can to scare us in any way, especially if it will help them advance their point of view on a particular subject. Like the author said Staph is truly a dangerous infection, but it has been around for quite some time so all the media is doing is scaring American’s into thinking it is some sort of plague attacking America. The media’s constant coverage of this even has our school’s PE teachers trying to prevent it. While I think the media has gone overboard on this topic, it might also be added that it has given American’s a little more awareness and education about Staph infections. I honestly though, really cannot stand our media, all you hear about on the news is nothing important it is just the latest gossip, poll, or bleeding story. It just disappoints me when I know there is something happening that is more immediately important to my life than global warming or Hillary winning the latest poll or the latest scare tactic. I mean I want to know what is happening elsewhere in the world, like Europe or Africa. As a result, lately I find myself watching the BBC news because it tells me more about American happenings and world ones than our own news does. That is just really sad if you ask me. Honestly, I don’t need to be scared into germ-aphobia I do just fine and I don’t need the news to tell me otherwise.
Lindsey Devaney
I really enjoyed reading this article; at times it was scary, other times sad and informational, then funny at different times. But honestly the writer of this article is right. Everyone knows about staph, but in the last few weeks it really has blown up. Usually you hear about wrestlers who don’t wash their clothes or body, then go wrestle, then somehow get this mysterious infection that is staph. Well there is a solution, just be smart and have good personnel hygiene. Take showers, clean your body scrub it, brush your teeth, and wash your hands after every bathroom break. It’s sad to say but America is not as clean as it has been before. In elementary school teachers always ask if you wash your hands, and you get taught that that is the right thing to do. But once you leave elementary school you don’t really get taught that anymore. I think that all schools should have big posters in the bathrooms that say wash your hands, stuff like that. The only way we as a nation will get rid of nasty infections like staff is to be cleaner, so let’s do that! I like how the writer ends the article, it’s like he is trying to scare the reader but in all reality he just wants everyone to be safe and clean.
I absolutely love this article. It is so true about our nation and how we react to things that take place. Before the past few weeks I knew about staff because of the days when I used to wrestle, but not many other people knew what it was, until now. I think that this is so typical of our nation; I think that we are a nation of hypochondriacs and once we find out about something that could kill us, we all freak out. The thing about most staff infections people don’t realize is that for it to become close to being fatal, you have to be a moron. You have to not do what the doctors tell you, not take your medicine, and ignore the weird looking rashes that you will get on your skin. In light of the first part of this article, I think that many people over react to the possible diseases that we can get. It’s as if some people think they don’t have an immune system and that every little germ will kill them. How do you think our parents lived without all the vaccinations and immunizations and soaps and other sanitary devices to make sure everything is germ free?
Oh NO!! I touched the keyboard!!! Now I’ll get Mad Cow Disease and maybe AIDS and I’ll die within a year! Sometimes the media reminds me of those my space bulletins–you know, “Repost this or you will die in 7 days?” Only it’s more like “Wash your hands and get a CAT scan or you will get sick, linger a few months, and die.”
I completely agree with the author. “We in America live in a constant state of fear….” So true. We’re so afraid of getting sick that we don’t even realize it takes more than just not washing your hands to get some of the more serious illnesses. If it weren’t for all of the campaigns telling us that AIDS is an STD and therefore only transmittable through body fluids like blood, I wouldn’t be surprised to see people starting a campaign to make people with HIV stay in those plastic bubbles.
I have always been concerned about getting sick, but this is ridiculous. Like the author said, there are far more pressing concerns than staph infections. Why don’t we worry about the fact that millions in Africa are dying from AIDS instead of worrying that we’ll catch it?
Neil brings up some great points about the media. I don’t trust them fully either. They say what they want you to hear and try to scare you while doing it. You always hear the quote “If it bleeds it leads”. This article is right; why all the sudden are we talking about staph infection it hasn’t become more deadly in the last month. Is it that more people are getting it? No it’s that our antibiotics are not working for it anymore, the virus has become immune to it. We’ve had many new diseases, like Neil said, that has entered our society and we have struggled to deal with them. The question is, why are they worrying us about them. Why don they just work on new antibiotics. They figured it out for the bird flu, which was supposed to kill of a third of our population. Like Neil stated they always figure it out. I am usually never worried about topics like this because the fact is that America as a society wills pull through and find a way to fix it. We always do and if we don’t then that’s life. Global warming going to get us anyways. lol
Old news. Seriously. the whole point of this article is to ridicule the media. It has less to do with Staph. Staph is not new. Staph is old. The media decided to shove it into the spotlight… all at the same time. Odd. And in other news…
It’s kind of like this comic picture I found online that says on a big yellow warning sign… “Caution! The edges of this sign are SHARP! Do not touch the edges of this sign! Also… the bridge is out ahead….”
Which reminds me of the media because the media usually shoves useless crap in our face and then on the SIDE note the really important stuff is brought up.
And I’m not saying this article was poorly written or ridiculing those who took the sickness as the main point. But I’ll ask, because I can. Did anyone else look at their keyboard and have to wonder who the last person to touch it was? And feel slightly disturbed? And notice that perhaps you do get a lot of stomach cramps and other random physical discomforts that never escalate to anything worse? Yeah. That’s so what I did. Not going to lie about that one.
Alright, I think we all agree that disease is just a fact of life, and it will always be out there, everywhere! As much as we can’t do anything to eliminate diseases, severe or not, we can prevent them. Wash your hands. Great, now that we are all on the same page, I think if anything, this article shows how easily the media can blow anything out of proportion. They could probably make Rachel Ray look like an evil murderer if they felt like it. The media has always, and will always, take their responsibility to inform the American public, outside the boundaries. This whole staph ordeal is basically ridiculous because we have enough energy to constantly worry about a disease, but we don’t put out a decent effort for uniformed health care? The medias recent obsession with staph infection shows how hypocritical we are. We worry so much about not getting a disease, but what happens when we do and we don’t have health care. The real epidemic is how easily we can be manipulated by the media, like the little toweletts in our lunches. That should be beautiful… NOT! And I agree with others, there are certainly more important things the media can focus on.
It is true; the media makes a living by blowing things out of proportion. It is how they make their money and if they didn’t make a big deal out of the little things then our country just wouldn’t be what it is today. Pitts makes a good point in saying Americans in fear. It’s the truth and we love it. Having something to fear is like a form of entertainment for most of us. It gives us something to talk and get all excited about. Take for example the most recent staph infection discovered. This MRSA “super bug” made millions of headlines and stirred up some excitement within our normal, every day lives. Instantly we had something new to worry about and something new to share with everyone around us. I am a cashier and comments I hearing from customers about “being careful and make sure to wash your hands extra carefully” became the norm for about a week. This is another thing that is true about our society. Every new “issue” lasts about two weeks, if that, and then instantly disappears once we are informed by the media of something new and deadly. It is actually kind of pathetic of us to think so much about these insignificant things when there are hundreds of other issues that should be more important.
Seems like one little fact can be carried a long way. Staph infection has been and will continue to stay around us in the United States and in other parts of the world. This author may have sounded pessimistic and sarcastic, but he was right. We cannot escape the things that surround our society. People live in fear and the media brings attention to it. Sure, who wants staph? That would suck, we get it now move on. Maybe the media was just bored and had nothing to write about so they thought scaring Americans about staph infection would be exciting. Personally I would rather hear something I do not know. I like hearing about things in different parts of the world. We all know that staph exists and it is harmful, so the media should cover something that we do not know. I think that things get carried away too much. The media’s priorities are all out of wack. Media finally discovers that staph can kill. Why not cover something important, like the War in Iraq? Yes, we cover it now, but little outbursts of these types of things seem to make it to the headlines before our troops do. People just need to be cautious and pick their battles. I liked the article and the author’s personality.
The media does pay too much attention to what is a scare or what makes us fearful. But what else is there to write about? Wee like to live comfortably and not in fear. We like to know that we are safe. So, anything that threatens us or our being is going to have our attention. Why? Well, we need to know how to respond. We need to know how to react to the problem. This is why fear draws sooo much attention in the media. If we always here about the good things, our mind set is to not care because everything in the world is just fine. So, we go on auto pilot. That is why media always tells us of the bad. Also, generally people are in a caring mood. This being said, if something goes wrong a lot of people are going to want to know what is going on so that they will be able to help out. This is why fear draws so much attention.
I totally agree with Leonard Pitts Jr. that the media has a tendency to go overboard, and sadly it is true that many Americans live in a constant state of fear due to media hype. This article was a very funny yet sad commentary on the media’s influence upon life in America. “We live evermore in the United States of Fear. We are entertained by it. Titillated by it. Distracted by it. And we have learned to move as media move.” In this age of new medicines and technology, an age where we have more going for us than ever before, it seems that we should be more comfortable with our lives, not throwing ever increasing fits over the same things that have been happening for years. It seems somehow unreasonable to me that many people are living with more fear in lives than ever. We can’t continue to let media induced fears have this much influence on our lives. Most recently it was MRSA, but does anyone else remember the bird flue scare? Or how about when we could open our mail due to SARs? And finally my personal favorite, remember when our computers were all going to die at the millennium due to the Y2K bug? The fact is there will always be some “thing” out there that the media is fervently warning us about, and we simply can’t let ourselves fall into that mindset.
Andrew Barnes
So, I’ll admit, I was one of those people who freaked out when people first started talking about MRSA. It’s Mr. Hill’s fault, he made it sound like we were going to get it and some of us were going to die. Then of course we talked about it again in PE and discussed how the school was going to deal with this issue and what we could do to protect ourselves.
I was completely ignorant to the fact that this isn’t something new. My mother works at a hospital and has for a very long time, she remembers when MRSA first became an issue at the hospital she was working at (Overlake in Bellevue). It’s easily preventable and the people who are in the greatest danger usually all ready have an infection of some kind.
But I don’t think its a bad thing that the media is alerting the masses to this. It’s not like they told us to panic, we just kind of do that on our own. Everyone is afraid of getting sick and possibly dying. And hello, I’d be afraid to get a staph infection, that just sounds unpleasant. But I do think that mentioning it 1,650 times in one month is definitely overkill.
I really liked reading this article. I thought that is was pretty informative and very truthful on the tendencies of the media. This “Staph infection outbreak” is just one example. It seems that when ever someone discovers a story like this, everyone else picks it up and runs with it. I think that it is interesting how this infection, which has been around for quite a while, has caught so much attention and yet we are in the midst of a war over seas that no one seems to pay much attention to anymore. What if it were the other way around? Say we were fighting a war here on our own soil, and there was an some sort of Staph outbreak going on somewhere over seas, would anyone care about the infection? What if we weren’t in a war then would we care about someone else’s Staph problem? I doubt we would. Its across the ocean, it can’t hurt us so why should we worry? We seem to only care when something can affect our lives directly. The media comes out and throws this problem at us and people become scared and worry about everything. I think it’s a joke. Yes, its true, people get sick and usually its no big deal, and sometimes it is. There is no way around it things happen good and bad, but you cant just sit in a corner and worry about everything your whole life. You just have to keep it as safe as you can but still live your life to the fullest. -Matt Powles
I agree with many who posted, saying that the media plays too critical a role in current societal life. Whether it be the military, what he said, she said, or about celebrates on political issues, we are sure that we will hear about it. This, obviously, is not necessarily a good thing, as an obvious “spin” comes into effect. Out of the hours of television we watch every week, what can we really believe? We are now at a point where there is both a conservative and liberal biased spin on nearly every article. There is no real moderate national news station in which I am familiar. But it really is unhealthy for the whole American population to walk away from a TV, thinking that the statistics are right, and then spread these phony stats. What I don’t understand is how these stations can actually get away with this crap, without court litigations piling up against them. And I also agree with Hallet when he says that the media does this crap solely for the purpose of entertainment; to grab the attention of occasional viewers, and to make them come back and watch again. What would one rather hear about, someone doing a right, or someone doing a wrong. I can’t even count the times that I have heard about Idaho Senator Larry Craig in the past couple of months since his “wide stance” story was unraveled. I just think that the media might not be the best thing for us, but what can we really do to make a change in this society other than boycotting it? The obvious answer is nothing.
Oh my goodness, Staph is the new “mad cow” and “bird flu” fad. The media decides that it is that time where freaking Americans out is a good thing. Well, they are right; it is very good, for them. Talking about an epidemic that was seen as a harmless infection has brought out the DEFCON 5 out of all of us and drawn more and more people to the media. Go figure! Sure this infection is bad, can apparently kill according to studies, but guess what? It can be prevented by simply staying clean and washing. Most people (at least I hope) are fairly clean so this infection poses very little threat to them. Scare tactics are the new way of getting the news out there because now that’s all people can talk about. I did find this article rather funny. “Or maybe the last person to use the computer recently came into contact with African green monkeys.” I thought to myself, who do I know that recently came into contact with African green monkeys? Then I realized probably Jarek haha but besides that the chances of really “catching” these diseases are very low. If media can exploit the people’s ignorance, by all means continue, I mean isn’t that what they pay you for?
-Caitlin Barschig
People are funny. Isn’t it weird how much we freak out about stuff like that? We see something about someone getting staff on the news, and we all freak out. We are just one big happy hypochondriac family! Not that I really have any room to talk, because I’m usually worried about getting sick. Granted, I work at a daycare, and therefore have slobber and snot wiped (whether intentionally or not) on me daily. So I think I have a pretty good excuse for being germ-a-phobic. As much as people are just plain old paranoid, the media plays a huge part in increasing the number and intensity of our big ol happy hypochondriac family. It’s really kind of creepy the power the media has over our everyday lives. If they say we should be worrying about something, we do. We don’t use common sense, and assure ourselves that we are not going to get a disease that birds get. We just take everything they say seriously, and accept it as the 100% truth. Like I said, people are funny. And it really bugs me that the media never covers anything positive. They never say anything about the good things that happen in our community or the world. It’s just war this and war that, and look at how many people died in this fire yesterday, and look who shot someone today. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s important to know about what is going on in the world around us, but is it all we can focus on?
~ Mags
Just for the sake of argument and heating things up a bit, I am going to completely disagree with Brynna. This article is ridiculous, without our media we would never be as healthy as we are today. If it wasn’t for the media focusing on our nations health I would never have learned about Mad Cow Disease and then given up beef. Where would we be without our precious media telling us what to avoid and how to protect ourselves? I’ll tell you where we’d be, buried six feet under that’s where. Think about it, back in the old days if there was a national news station that people would watch so many lives would have been saved from the plague. I think of the medias obsession over diseases is a blessing really. At least someone is watching out for the health of America. Who cares if our media doesn’t cover all the happy panda births around the world, at least we know what to avoid to stay alive. This is survival of the fittest people and I’m not letting no little staff infection keep me from living large. I say the media is doing everything right, keeping us on our toes, keeping us alive. I just feel bad for the little wimps out there who can’t handle the truth. I say grow up, this is reality there are deadly diseases that will kill you and if you can’t handle that, then you should just stay at home sucking on your thumb in your plastic bubble. But I will brave the world and thanks to our media, I will know how to stay alive. Knowledge is power my friends, keep that in mind if you want to stay alive.
I disagree with every single person who posted on this topic (except for Jackie). Staff Infection is sweeping the U.S. like the California wildfires and capturing the hearts of millions. It’s not surprising to me at all that it killed 19,000 people in 2005; I saw this coming a million miles away. The most startling, surprising, noteworthy part of this article was the fact that Staff has gone this long without getting the widespread media attention it deserves. As Trevor said, bird flu only killed about five people. It would have been a lot more if not for the media’s warnings. Imagine if the media wouldn’t have warned us about bird flu. A lot more than five people would be running around with beaks and wings. The media is doing what needs to be done in this situation.
Also, I don’t know what Pitts is saying about the “United States of Fear.” Last I checked, that third word was “America.” All this talk about the media putting fear in us is hodgepodge. “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,” said the late, great Ronald Reagan. And you know what: the man was right. If this was indeed the “United States of Fear,” we would only fear fear, meaning we would be fearing ourselves, which is utterly ridiculous. We are the safest nation in the world. The fear of us should be coming from countries like Iraq who might have to face our military muscle.
In conclusion, I think the only member of the media in the wrong here is Mr. Leonard Pitts, Jr. I’m sorry, but if it wasn’t for the media, I would probably be infected with SARS, bird flu, staph, and every other disease with four legs and a pulse. So once again, thank you media for keeping our great nation, the United States of AMERICA, safe.
Brian Baker
I agree with Brian Baker. Excellent analysis Brian, it’s no wonder you are ASB president.
Whoa whoa whoa.
The last part of your response to this article set me off, my friend. I apologize, but here’s the thing…
The media is used to inform us, yes. There has been a greater percentage of natural disasters, diseases, and many other things that have rampaged across the U.S. and the rest of the world. We need to hear these things, as hard as they may be, again, YES.
HOWEVER the media continues to overblast things and beat topics to the point of DEATH. The article may have sounded incredibly harsh, but I think you may have overreacted a little and this may have biased your response.
If you haven’t noticed, for example, all we hear about the war in Iraq is death, death, death, and more death. Bombings, destruction, maiming of the human race, suicide…it’s all there, if you want it. And we hear no news, or rarely any, for that matter, of any progress. As I was watching the movie the other night, “Primary Colors”, I heard a line that summed up quite a bit. It was along the lines of this, where only guilt, depression, accidents, and horrible things sell. That’s it.
These topics, though useful and informative, eventually get thrashed to ribbons.
As for your paragraph about fear, I firmly disagree with you. We may be at this for a while, but as for the United States of America remark and how we are the “safest nation in the world”…no nation is a safe nation, as far as I’m concerned. Girls are getting raped in alleyways in Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas; store owners are getting robbed in even small places like Spokane; children are snapping and committing horrible crimes that I have never heard of even in places like China; school shootings are running rampant across the country…
I don’t know how this is the “safest nation”. I will be honest. I fear for my life when I walk alone at night.
If this is the safest nation, then why do I fear being killed or raped, because I’m a woman?
Gee, I must be fearing myself.
Huh. That sounds logical.
Or not.
Its Our Fault Too
Ridiculing the media is only half the point. I agree with everyone that the media has a tendency to wear on one’s nerves; I know it wears on mine. However, the mass media is a business like any other. Besides their prescribed duty of informing the general public, they’re out to make money, and sensationalism sells. Which is entirely the point! Americans, displaying some strange affinity to repeated stories of gloom and doom, choose to buy into it. We make the conscious decision to watch the evening news, knowing full well its primary focus will be negative because the negative is news. Seriously, do the evening news need a disclaimer like other consumer products – “Caution: product contains negative and possibly frightening information”? Admit it, it is much more interesting, albeit horrific, to hear or read about how many casualties were caused by a suicide bomber in an Iraq market than how much money the local farmers’ market collected over the weekend. I refuse to believe that this pervading air of fear across our country is solely the media’s fault; it’s ours too, for letting ourselves be scared. It is good to be informed, but, like Pitts stated, we move like the media moves, constantly changing direction, attention gripped by anything that might be potentially lethal. If we want to change how the media broadcasts news, we need to change our attitudes first.
In response to Andrew Barnes,
I agree with your statement: “the media has a tendency to go overboard”. This is very true, some more than others but all the same it’s a sad fact. The fact the people care so much about other peoples life’s amazes me even more. I mean seriously, I couldn’t care less that so and so are getting married or someone got their haircut. Besides that is the media on other topics that they go overboard on so that people pay attention. “We live evermore in the United States of Fear. We are entertained by it. Titillated by it. Distracted by it. And we have learned to move as media move.” This pretty much sums it up right here; it’s a perfect example of how our media works. The sad fact is that this sort of media attention isn’t going to end, because in the age we live in media and technology is growing at a fast rate. I don’t see us moving on past the media informing us on everything there is to know…and making it seem more “scary”.
~Ryan Brannan
This article is probably the most pointless thing I have ever read. First of all, it mainly just knocks on the media by using one source to attack it: the media. The fact that the article is attacking the very thing used to publish it seems just a little bit ridiculous to me. As Jackie put it, “This article is ridiculous.” The thing is, although the media does seem to overplay negative things like diseases and deaths, I don’t always believe that this is really a bad thing to focus on. If the media all of a sudden started focusing on the “birthday of a baby panda in China” (as Brynna mentioned) or how beautiful butterflies are, frankly I would be really, really worried. I would have to think that either there is nothing that could possibly harm me in the world or that the government is covering something up that they don’t want me to know. Although I don’t always trust the media, my mistrust of the government most of the time is much greater. Therefore I like the fact that the media is able to display all the negatives so that I will know if the government is trying to cover things up.
As for Brynna’s argument about how America is a land of fear and that she has to fear walking down the streets in fear of being raped or murdered because she is a woman, I believe that she is actually furthering Jackie’s and Brian’s arguments that the media is worthwhile in its negativity. If the media was not constantly telling Brynna how bad people can be toward women, she might feel free to walk around in alleyways in the middle of the night where rapings and murders happen. I feel the fact that Brynna is afraid of this proves that the media’s over attention is useful in the safety of at least one person.
Response to everyone:
Like Mandy, after reading ¾ of the article I finally saw what Pitts’s argument was about. And like everyone else I agree with him. I agree with everyone when they say that the media puts a lot of fear into the public. For example, Trevor said that ABC made a documentary saying that the whole population will demolish because of the bird flu, but in reality only five people died from it. What was the hype about? I hate how the media puts so much fear into the public, acting like we are going to die from a mosquito bite or a bee sting, when it is not a big deal at all. All the media wants is a story; they take a little issue and put so much spin into it that it becomes the world’s most deadly disease. I really liked this article because it finally spoke the truth and it made me laugh. I just hope that the media’s exaggerations don’t go too far that we become a paranoid country. Like Megan said, “the media can manipulate the public very easily to their advantage.” It is sad but very true.
-John, have you ever heard the phrase “fight fire with fire.” That’s all the article is doing. Fighting the media with the media.
I liked this article. It put my thoughts for many years in to a few paragraphs and simple words. I don’t think that it is a recent problem that we’re having though. For a while now the causes of cancer have been ever expanding. Also, back in the 70’s, the media was scaring people about something called global cooling! Now it’s global warming. Hey! There’s another good cliché phrase: “history repeats itself” I do think the media is pretty smart though, because their tactics are obviously working if Jackie stops eating beef and more and more people are spending money on their fancy hybrids.
The media is just a business. They blow things out of proportion to earn money. If I had a gun to my head I’d be scared. And if the man told me to give him 50 bucks, I probably would. If the media tells me that the entire planet will blowup into a million pieces unless I buy a car that is “environment friendly” I’d probably do that too, depending on how well they sell the story.
Trevor, I have to agree with you that if the media gets a hold of something, they will use it towards their advantage. Germs and bacteria are all around us. People are going to get sick one way or another. You bring up a good point on the whole bird flu pandemic. Once the story broke out over seas, the media was already predicting where the bird flu would land next and said it could be possibly worse than the bubonic plague. Good call on that one NBC, ABC, and CBS. It never really produced into what it was hyped up to be. People get staph infections all the time. Our wrestlers unfortunately get it and somehow Jarek got it too. When one of our wrestlers got a staph infection, I did really see our school freaking out and going to media to warn the community about the infection. If the media is so into this, they should report all the staph infections. People get sick, its life. People are going to contract these bacteria’s or infection’s one way or another. Have I yet to meet a person that hasn’t been sick at least once in their life. All the media is trying to do is draw people into a sickness that won’t affect that many people just to bring up their ratings.
That Pittz attempted to condemn the media through an article should not diminish his warrants, as John suggested. The format of his polemic merely reflects his occupation. His argument should garner just as much respect as if he had spoke at an event or authored a book. Besides, he does not suggest that media can’t offer access to valuable information or provide an opportunity for people to express opposing viewpoints; all he criticizes is the tendency of news reports to feed the American longing for thrill, which he abstains from in his article. Therefore, he does not bite back his accusation.
The disease craze shows how the United States eats up danger and drama, whether the threat is fabricated, exaggerated, or genuine. Most often, the bugs fall under that middle category. I think Brian has a point about the potential for news to help contain epidemics, though I don’t believe they capitalize on their resources or release the right information. A calm message of “what-to-do’s” would be far more effective than reporting numbers and scaring the public into overreacting. In fact, by these methods, the media exacerbates diseases by encouraging the use of antibiotics and preventative medicines in excess. By increasing the exposure of harmless viruses to our cures, they develop resistance and pose a greater threat if they become fatal.
Classic example of the media. They only do this to make money. If they have “the best coverage of MRSA”, more people will watch their station, and they can charge more for commercials, and not to mention, hope to develop viewer loyalty to their station. Everything that the media shows you is money driven. Why do you think they report all the bad news? It’s because people don’t care about all the good things that are happening; to them, it’s not news. Born was the age of “Breaking News” every 10 minutes. Born was the age of news reporters standing in the middle of nowhere at midnight just so their station can seem to be on top of things.
Do not let the media scare you. Remember right after the Minnesota bridge collapse? The media was all like “there are about 4000 bridges in the United States that are ‘structurally deficient.’” Then so I guess everyone got scared and stuff. And then the next day, they really emphasized that “these bridges are not going to fall down. It just means that they are not in top shape.” …I don’t believe the news anymore when they have topics like this because all they do is blow things out of proportion.
-Jason Wong
Brian I really got to disagree with you on this one. I don’t think that all of that bird flu scare changed the lifestyle of many Americans. I think that once an epidemic started, then people will start changing their ways but I don’t think that the news will change the ways of the majority of Americans. And staph kills 19,000 people in a year. if we’re freaking out over this, why aren’t we freaking out of bigger death tolls like cancer, or car safety. Staph will happen and i don’t think this panic by the news will drop the death tolls. The news has taken a topic and tried to act like it’s new. Kind of like the “new 23 flavor” Dr. Pepper. It wasn’t really new. but they got millions of people to by Dr. Peper because they thought it was new. That’s all that’s going on here is news stations striving to be the top dogs in the industry. The local news on staph is understandable because of the breakout in Deer Park but there is no need for this insane amount of national attention on a consistant infection.
So, my response is to Brynna. I find it a little humorous how you can sit there and say you want to hear news of new panda bears–that has got to be one of the most insignificant things I’ve ever heard! I’m not trying to be rude or anything, but humans only live so long. We are born, we live a short time, and then we die. So, if there is a danger that may shorten your life but is avoidable, why wouldn’t you want to be informed? I mean, I understand that Staph hasn’t become any more deadly recently, but the fact of the matter is it could be deadly!
I know that the media gets bashed a lot; to some extent, I can understand why. I admit it is a little ridiculous that on slow news weeks, we get a ka-trillion pictures of Britney’s bald head or something along those lines. But if it was soooooo important to you to avoid all this sadness and misery and whatever else it is that you’re complaining about, then you could certainly look those frivolous things up yourself and find your own research on them. Don’t blame the media for trying to be prosperous and successful like every other business and person in America!!