Plum Crazy

In a journalistic circle-jerk, the Washington Post has an article on the reaction of the media to the non-story about the plague in New York City. Now, is this a useful piece critiquing the tendency of the media to create news where none exists? No. It's a rehash of the same non-story about the plague that begins with the fact that the media reported on it.

Since the Post wouldn't write the critique about how the media manufactures news, let me do it. What we had here was a story about nothing. A couple from New Mexico was infected with plague. Okay, so what? Every year a person or two in New Mexico gets plague. Well, so they happened to be in New York City, one of the two centers of the journalistic universe, when they came down with the symptoms. Would CNN and Fox News have reported on this nationally if the couple had been in New Mexico when they started showing symptoms? Of course not. It would have been treated as the dull, local news story it was.

However, since they were in New York, two factors came into play. The first is that the worse of the 9/11 attacks happened in New York City. So we have a nice terrorism tie-in. Does it matter that bubonic plague is hardly the terrorist's choice of biological warfare? It's eminently treatable. It's not airborne. You can't get it from food or drink. It's not passed by contact unless it gets really bad and turns into pneumonic plague (a remote possibility, since most would have been taking antibiotics before that ever happened). It's passed by flea bites. Are the terrorists going to be starting flea farms to infect the public? I wish they were that stupid.

I suppose you might say that the journalists didn't know how it was transmitted. My first inclination is to say that anyone who paid attention in high school history would have known that it was passed by flea bites. But perhaps I overestimate the education level of journalists. Nevertheless, that's why they have research staff and fact-checkers. And it takes seconds to turn up this fact with a simple Google search. Type in "bubonic plague." Click on the first link that pops up. It tells you in the second sentence: "Plague mainly affects rodents, but fleas can transmit the disease to people." What, the story is so hot that they can't spend a few seconds retrieving this fact? That's ludicrous.

This was nothing but an attempt to grab viewership. Forget that they were scaring people unnecessarily. It's all about the ratings, man. Besides, they managed to inform people about all those pesky little facts during the stories. So the teasers and blaring headlines were just cynical ways to get people to pay attention. They do it all the time. Scary teasers to get you to watch a non-story. There once was an idea of journalistic ethics, that the news media had a responsibility to the public to inform and educate. Those days are long gone. Why even call it news anymore? Why not just flat out admit they view themselves as entertainment?

The second factor is that journalists believe that New York City and Washington, DC are constantly on the minds of the American public. That's because the national news media is concentrated in those two cities. "Of course the public wants to know about everything going in in New York City and DC. We live there, and they must be obsessed with it for that reason." Guess again. The public cares about things going on in New York City and DC that affect their lives. So, the state of the financial markets, legislation in Congress, or any event of national importance interests them. And they even, bizarrely, are fascinated with the lives of celebrities and politicians. But that's realistically about it. Despite the existence of mass concentrations of journalists in these two cities, the American public is not interested in our local news. They are interested in their local news. I know, the selfish bastards.