CNN: Calm? No Never!
What is wrong with CNN? Everyone is trying to calm the American public’s worries about this Swine Flu Epidemic, and what does CNN do? They throw gas on the fire. Today they announced the “first U.S. death” associated with the outbreak. However, they don’t know anything about the child other than his or her age (they didn’t even know the gender) and that s/he came from Mexico. Well let me ask you something, CNN. If the child came from Mexico and was being treated in the United States, is that really a U.S. death? The fact that we haven’t had any deaths is not really because America is super rad and the flu knows to stay on the other side of the border. We have medicine here, and a higher standard of living. Americans are more likely to withstand a flu epidemic than Mexico just generally. The fact that this was a young child made it even less likely that even getting proper medical care it was going to survive.
I grieve for this child’s family and all the families who have been affected by this major health crisis, but making people paranoid and ratcheting up the panic level is not going to help anyone. Obviously, this is what CNN and any other news organization that cares about advertising dollars does, but that is a discussion for another time. For the moment, calm the heck down.