Drivel Dressed As News

Alas it's not new - the lamentable quality of TV journalism - but I suspect that in its relentless quest to plumb the depths of inanity it will eventually come to be regarded as a singularly 21st Century feature.

As previous ages were noted for, among other things, believing that the Earth was flat or meting out cruel and unusual punishments or widespread use of slavery, so our own period of soon-to-be history will be characterized as a time when mass media news organizations hosed vast swathes of the populus with vacuous trash dressed up (unconvincingly) as matters of public interest.

A while back we had swivel eyed frothing about Bird Flu (or Avian Influenza or HN51 as the more "serious" outlets termed it). There was of course no pandemic to get excited about, nor was there ever likely to be one - the circumstances of the outbreak pretty much told us that. Eventually even the professionally breathless reporters tired of trying to sex-up images of a few dead swans and returned to talking utter bollocks about politics, sport and the dreary antics of "celebrities".

More recently it's the deadly Swine Flu that's killed, um, not very many people at all really, in fact far fewer than normal no-fancy-name widely unreported flu regularly kills. But what stood out was not so much reporters and presenters whipping themselves into a frenzy (that is after all simply par for the course) but the bandying about of utterly meaningless figures.

At one stage we were informed (if that's really the right word in this context) that there were 150 ("suspected") deaths. At no point were we ever told how many were infected. There is one heck of a difference between a virus that say infects 1.5 million causing 150 fatalities and one that causes 150 deaths out of say 200 infected.

This was totally meaningless data. Pneumonia kills tends of thousands each year whereas Ebola sees off less than a handful. However most people who get pneumonia don't in fact die as a result, but your chances with Ebola are about nil. Which do you think - based solely on the body count - is the more dangerous of the two?

Later we were treated to the news that the World Health Organization had upgraded its pandemic alert level from 3 to 4 out of a possible 6. Were we ever told how this scale is calibrated? Whether it is linear or logarithmic, and if the latter what base log is used? Nope. Had this been an increase from 3 to 4 on the Richter scale we would know that things were 10 times worse, but on the Beaufort scale it would just be a single increment higher.

Why not just tell us the Meerkats at the local zoo had increased their eagle alert levels to 8.4? This, as is well known, assigns an index to a Fibonacci sequence that describes Meerkat peer ranking. Simples.