‘Just comical’ claims from the fringe right

I don’t think you’ll find New York Times columnists complimenting CNN’s reporting very often, but one exception came yesterday with Thomas Friedman’s piece, titled “Too Good To Check,” in which Friedman lauds Anderson Cooper’s recent efforts in unveiling a patent untruth circulating in conservative circles about the alleged cost of President Obama’s recent trip to India and elsewhere overseas. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, radio host Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others (I’m sure there are others. Although I have not listened to Mark Levin lately [Can’t tolerate his nasally snarl], he surely hopped on the bandwagon like his like-minded-bash-the-Obama-administration-at-any-cost brethren) all claimed that the administration was spending some $200 million per day on the trip.

Here is Friedman quoting Bachman, who appeared on Cooper’s show:

I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.

Here is the Anderson Cooper video, in which he asks Bachmann what specifically she would like to cut in federal spending now that her party controls the House.

In the absence of any answers, she proceeds to immediately and ludicrously lampoon Obama’s “over the top” spending. The only sparse answer she gives as to how the Republicans would account for some $700 billion in lost revenue if the Bush tax cuts were extended is to suggest that Medicare eligibility levels may be too high. Cooper asked for three; he got one … half answer. Here is one exchange:

COOPER: But extending the Bush tax cuts will mean, in order to offset the costs of extending the Bush tax cuts, you have to come up with $700 billion dollars just in spending cuts alone just to offset that cost. If you acknowledge that that is true, what are three things you would cut immediately to help offset those costs?

BACHMANN: Well, it’s always considered a cost when people are allowed to keep their own money. I don’t think that it’s a cost when people get to keep their own money. Right now, the current tax policy is, in my mind, it’s actually too high. The taxes right now. If we don’t extend these tax cuts, for instance, in my district in Minnesota, we’ll see 1.6 … 1.2 billion dollars taken out of the pockets of my constituents and taken out of my local community, where it will be spent, instead, 1.2 additional dollars will be sent to Washington D.C. sucked into that hole.

Here, of course, Bachmann missed the point and dodged the question altogether. The federal government has to have money to continue to offer such services as Social Security and Medicare. The “cost” to which Cooper was referring was the cost the federal government incurs in continuing to offer services, not the cost to locals, and Bachmann failed miserably, and predictably, from the Palin mode.

But back to Friedman, who picks up Obama’s trip to India in his column:

The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”

It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.

“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”

Later, Friedman notes:

Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time. He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

The fringe right’s tactic here, as Bachmann, Savage and others use without fail, is to dodge substantive talk on specific reform with dodgy figures from even dodgier sources to blast Obama at all costs, never mind fact-checking any of their claims. Savage has even made analogies between Obama and the Red Army Faction, saying that while the RAF was a violent, left-wing movement, Obama was seeking to induce a nonviolent socialist revolution in America. For however untrue that may be, that kind of talk makes Savage and the gang look like raving lunatics. Some on the right, as Friedman notes, even called Obama’s trip a “vacation.” All the while, they proceed to make sweeping suggestions on how we must cut spending and rein in the government but offer barely anything in the way of substantive solutions. As I have said before, in the absence of intelligent ideas in political discourse, nothing is left but desperate and emotionally-charged ranting.

Friedman concludes by noting that

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together.

While I agree with him wholeheartedly, we can’t forget how these people became “widely followed” public figures: the public put them there, which is an unfortunate truth that seems to say less about the figures themselves (They just ride the wave to the bank) and more about the people, who, by and large, don’t know what is best for them or how to think critically about important issues. The best we can hope for, as he says, is that more people will learn not to swallow everything they hear on radio and television without doing their own fact-checking. But given that most people only watch or listen to commentators that reinforce, rather than challenge, their own views, I can’t be sure such a noble exercise will gain widespread popularity.

Hitchens: with cancer, still lucid, still a contrarian

I’m deeply saddened by this news, but Chrisopher Htichens, a writer and thinker whom I deeply admire for both his literary mastery and intellectual thought, has announced in a characteristic brilliantly-written column that he has esophageal cancer, a form of the disease that most folks don’t come back from. He was diagnosed two months ago.

Here is the entire interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper:

And here is Hitchens himself on the Topic of Cancer.

BP underestimates impact of spill

The Associated Press this weekend released a good enterprise piece on BP’s tendency to consistently misrepresent or downplay the full effects of its oil rig debacle, which as of now has put somewhere between 18 million to 40 million gallons of crude in the ocean. Obviously, lowballing the estimates would behoove BP, since they face penalties based on how much oil actually leaks. According to the article:

On almost every issue — the amount of gushing oil, the environmental impact, even how to stop the leak — BP’s statements have proven wrong. The erosion of the company’s credibility may prove as difficult to stop as the oil spewing from the sea floor.

“They keep making one mistake after another. That gives the impression that they’re hiding things,” said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has been critical of BP’s reluctance to publicly release videos of the underwater gusher. “These guys either do not have any sense of accountability to the public or they are Neanderthals when it comes to public relations.”

And later in the story, responding a question about why BP had presented wrong numbers on numerous fronts regarding the impact, BP spokesman David Nicholas said,

This event is unprecedented; no company, no one, has ever had to attempt to deal with a situation such as this at depths such as this before. BP, the Unified Command, the federal authorities and the hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals engaged on this effort, are doing everything we can to bring it under control and make it good.

as if “unprecedented” is a good enough excuse to not have a solution in case the worse happens. So too, BP Managing Director Robert Dudley clambered for excuses when quizzed on the company’s inept, or nonexistent, disaster policies on the Sunday edition of CNN’s State of the Union.

Here’s the video:

McCain on health care criticism: ‘Be respectful’

The reactionary behavior continued this week over passage of the most sweeping piece of legislation in decades, as lawmakers are getting incendiary and offensive messages and voicemails from their angry, to the point of irrational (or, perhaps, some protesters were irrational to begin with), constituents. Rep. Bart Stupak, for instance, an anti-abortion Democratic lawmaker who was key in getting the bill passed, received a voicemail with these comments:

Think about this. There are millions of people across the country who wish you ill, and all of those negative thoughts projected on you will materialize into something that is not very good for you.

Is the caller really talking about Karma here or some sort of mystical conjoining of the minds against a mutually hated individual? If so, that tells us all we need to know about the caller.

Here is content from two other calls from CNN’s story:

“Stupak, you are a lowlife, baby-murdering scumbag, pile of steaming crap. You’re a cowardly punk, Stupak, that’s what you are. You and your family are scum,” an unidentified caller said. “That’s what you are, Stupak. You are a piece of crap.”

“Go to hell, you piece of [expletive deleted]” another caller said.

And here’s a video detailing some of the broken windows and other ugly incidents, including one disgraceful act by Rep. Steve King:

In a recent interview with CNN’s John King, Sen. John McCain, while not villifying Sarah Palin’s recent graphic that placed crosshairs over 20 House Democrats that “we” (McCain/Palin) carried in 2008 who voted for the health care reform bill, McCain did speak against over-the-top, and frankly, offensive and childish gestures by Steve King in front of health care protesters at the Capitol. Encouragingly, before John King even got a question out about Steve King’s action, McCain said,

Uncalled for, of course that’s uncalled for. Of course that’s uncalled for, John. And we see, from the person who yelled, ‘baby killer.’ But I think that we’ve gotta urge everybody to be respectful.

While I don’t necessary agree with most of McCain’s political stances, he has always proven to me that he has a rational and independent-thinking mind.

Here’s the interview:

SOTU reax

CNN has created an interactive graphic allowing users to view any of 189,577 Twitter comments in response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union from Wednesday. The categories of commentators are “Support Obama,” “Oppose Obama,” “Mixed Reaction,” “Great Speech” and “Obama Too Liberal.”

Also, moveon.org held its first “real time dial test” of the speech, with about 10,000 moveon.org members participating. Understanding that this chart represents progressive reactions, here are those results:

Charting member reactions to SOTU speech

Also, here are some thoughts from The Atlantic’s James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan.

The New York Times chimed in today with its unsigned editorial, lauding Obama as a “gifted orator,” with the ability to “inspire with grand vision and the simple truth frankly spoken,” and here are a some more comments from various luminaries posted by the San Francisco Chronicle:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican
“Today’s announcement is fantastic news for job creation in California. … The Obama administration is strongly supporting California’s high-speed rail project, which is the largest public works project in the nation and will create jobs, save billions of pounds of greenhouse gases and be the first true high-speed rail system to break ground in the nation.”

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena

“As families across the country tighten their belt, we need to do some trimming of the fat in Washington, too. However, I’m going to watch very carefully to make sure that the president lives up to his promise to go through the budget line by line, rather than make across-the-board spending cuts that might do more harm than good to our local and national economies.”

Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, Republican

“We want results, not rhetoric. We want cooperation, not partisanship. … All Americans agree we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible and high quality. But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government.”

Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara

“I commend President Obama for calling for the repeal of the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. … We have been actively working on this issue in Congress and are more than ready to work with the president to ensure that this misguided policy is repealed as quickly as possible.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky

“I’m hopeful the administration’s new focus on the economy will lead it to say no to more spending and debt, more bailouts, and more government.”

Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez

“(Obama) hit it out of the park. He made it very clear why we’re in this struggle to change the economy – and took the Congress, took the Senate especially, to the woodshed for not getting these things done.”

On Dobbs’ CNN goodbye

I said here that my next post related to immigration would be about Lou Dobbs’ recent on-air announcement that he was leaving CNN, but I got a bit sidetracked thinking about the new movie, “2012.”

But back on point, previously I referenced a New York Times editorial titled, quite fondly so, “A Farewell to Lou,” in which the editorial board points out that Dobbs thoughts on illegal immigration, in particular, have been “corrosive” to the public discourse on the complex issue and damaging to any honest discussion.

As the piece notes, Dobbs stated Nov. 11 while on the air that he was leaving CNN, having been granted

a release from my contract that will enable me to pursue new opportunities

by CNN president Jon Klein. If you are interested, here’s the video:

As part of the short segment, Dobbs said,

Over the past six months, it’s become increasing clear that strong winds of change have begun buffetting this country and affecting all of us and some leaders and media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day and to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.

He pointed to climate change, immigration, the two wars and other issues as some of the greatest challenges facing the country. Dobbs continued:

Unfortunately, these issues are now defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than by rigorous, empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion. I will be working diligently to change that as best I can.

Before I continue, let me say that I agree with The Times that Dobbs is, indeed, the same polarizing figure of which he seems to be attempting to refute. The editorial said:

Mr. Dobbs couldn’t have phrased a more apt criticism of himself. He calls himself Mr. Independent, but he is far closer in style and method to the right-wing ranters who mold the facts to shape the argument on television and on AM radio, where Mr. Dobbs still has a show. Mr. Dobbs’s CNN program has long been a nesting ground for untruths and conspiracy theories: fretting over a nonexistent, immigrant-borne leprosy epidemic; questioning President Obama’s citizenship; issuing dark warnings about the “North American Union,” a supposed plot to strangle United States sovereignty.

No argument there, and again, I agree, but I must point out that The Times piece cut off the quote before Dobbs said, “I will be working diligently to change that as best I can.”

I don’t believe him, of course, and I think he was just throwing a bone to critics who say he is, indeed, a partisan in populist clothing, but I just thought it was important to note that The Times skewed what Dobbs was saying in that part, even though it’s clear to me, and undoubtedly to The Times, that either, A) Dobbs doesn’t really mean what he said, or B) Dobbs doesn’t know the difference between “partisanship and ideology” and approaching issues with “empirical thought and forthright analysis.”

Regardless, he really did make “the most trusted name in news” more partisan, and lest the network replace Dobbs with another talking head, it will be a somewhat more even-handed network. Even with Dobbs, it was more “sober,” as the editorial puts it, than FOX News and MSNBC, both of which really should be ashamed because they are each perfect foils of the other, right and left, respectively, and are doing their part to ensure that journalism will meet certain death.

It’s unclear what Dobbs will do next, but he’s apparently just going to focus on his radio show for now and continue to prop up the already right-wing dominated airwaves. Not that I care, and free speech for all, I say, but he’s certainly stewing in the cesspool along with Sean Hannity’s, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh and others, and is far from independent.

A story from Reuters traces how Dobbs transitioned from a straight-laced newsman to an all-out commentator:

He returned two years later (after a stint at the network from 1980-1999) to become host and managing editor of a new general news broadcast, and for a time renewed his Moneyline show.

But Dobbs’ role at the network changed dramatically.

“He morphed from being an economic and finance guy to being much more in the style of an opinion commentator,” independent television news analyst Andrew Tyndall said. “He turned into specializing on the illegal immigrants story, which was very hot three years ago or four years ago.”

Thus, he probably did CNN a favor by stepping down (or maybe he was forced into the decision) if the network wants to be truer to its “most trusted name in news” mantra. Tyndall noted the “differences” between Dobbs line of thinking editorially and CNN officials.

“There’s clearly editorial differences between the way CNN wants to go and the direction he wants to go.”

Top 10 things that should disappear immediately (but probably won’t)

1. Balloon boy — The next ridiculous “weird” news story that, in truth, deserved two paragraphs of coverage and nothing more, yet the media ballooned this thing into the ether (sorry it was irrestible), and we groan collectively.

2. Glenn Beck — We only need to watch Beck’s on-air sniveling, scare-mongering for about two minutes to realize that there’s little in the way of Painean common sense in that noggin.

3. Michael Jackson — Why dredge up yet another posthumous track from another dead pop star? The tradition is an old one, from John Lennon to Kurt Cobain to Tupac. This reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about Tupac’s song from 1994.

4. Limbaugh, Al Sharpton — Limbaugh (thankfully) won’t be an NFL owner (at least not right now). Rush writes a column for the The Wall Street Journal. Sharpton threatens to file a lawsuit. Again, groans. Both are polarizing figures and are as predictable in such polarization as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

5. Dave Letterman’s personal life — Although it was commendable in some rights that he told his story of bribery and sexual actions on the air, we really don’t care. Just give us jokes, Dave. And if you couldn’t tell, the audience wasn’t even clear whether you were jesting or were actually serious.

6. Anna Nicole Smith — Drinking from a baby bottle? That-a-way to make your life come full circle! Get yourself so screwed up that you are reduced to sipping a sedative straight infant-style.

7. Rod Blagojevich — “Celebrity Apprentice?” ‘Nuff said.

8. Celebrity Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars, etc — Again, groans.

9. Larry King — Next four guests on the show: Balloon boy (See No. 1), Suzanne Somers, George Lopez and Maria Shriver. Hard-hitting, important interviews there. I’m not sure at what point King became irrelevant, but the point has long-since passed.

10. Blogs as news aggregates — I don’t make this final point to toot my own horn. In fact, I wish I could write more, but the simple nature of my approach to blogging limits how much time I can devote to it (as I also write news stories, sports stories and usually a column for a newspaper each week). Rarely, very rarely, I might post a single photo and a single sentence and make that “my” statement for the day, but this guy, Andrew Sullivan, is an aggregater among aggregaters. In one day (Oct. 17), I counted more than 20 posts. On another day, I counted about 40 … in a single day! True, he’s a good writer and reporter. His “Dear President Bush” for The Atlantic is exceptional, and I highly suggest folks take a look at it, but we don’t see much of that writing in his blog. Of the 20-something posts I counted today, most of the quotes from other sources were longer than the actual original content of the post itself. One “post” was just a picture of a painting with a caption from another source, saying how the painting, once valued at millions of dollars, was bought for $19,000.

I’m highly hostile of blogs of this kind because they simply don’t say anything. Sure, Sullivan has surely said plenty in his other endeavors, but why have a blog if you aren’t going to say anything? Anyone with a Web browser can find a bunch of quotes and links and put them together. I refuse to roam the Webosphere and collect a collage of news items every single day. Anyone can regurgitate information previously posted elsewhere. Indeed, it’s hard for me to imagine Sullivan having time for other endeavors, when on this day, he “blogged” from 8 a.m. to nearly 9 p.m., cobbling together these 20-something posts of quotes and pictures.

This is the predominant reason I stayed away from blogging as long as I did. I saw it as a short cut, something akin to a slightly wordier Twitter, in which folks who aren’t really writers (Sullivan really is a writer; I just use his ill-conceived blog as an example), turn to this medium to espouse their opinions in a pithy sentence or paragraph, but who don’t really have the wherewithal to flesh out full arguments. Thus, I decided if I were to pursue a blog of sorts, it would actually contain well-thought-out opinions. My posts, then, are more like essays; that’s why they come less frequently than others but with more content. They are an attempt to inform and make people think about concepts and ideas other than, perhaps, what they normally would.

The above points, however, have the opposite effect, and this is the reason why I made this list.

Note: All but the last point on this list were referenced from CNN, the most trusted name in news.

Obama, the peace prize and country

Much has been said and written today about the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to President Barack Obama, from Michelle Malkin’s spastic, right-of-right, true-to-form fragmentary post on the subject, to the Huffington Post’s more rosey view of the man. This BBC story attempts to give a sweeping view of some of the sentiments coming from the American media on the announcement.

Obama is the third sitting president to have been given the honor, followed by Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter has also won it, but that award came 20 or so years after he left office. Al Gore has as well.

I think this award, more than anything else, amounts to Obama being perceived in much of Europe as the “un-Bush,” as David Ignatius of The Washington Post dubbed it, perhaps fueled, in part, by his speech Sept. 23 to the U.N. General Assembly, and his speech in Cairo, and in his speech on race, and his diplomatic policies, his reaching out to the Muslim world, and, finally, his stance on nuclear nonproliferation. As Ignatius notes,

That’s what he’s being honored for, really: reconnecting America to the world and making us popular again. If you want to understand the sentiments behind the prize, look at the numbers in the Transatlantic Trends report released last month by the German Marshall Fund. Obama’s approval rating in Germany: 92 percent compared to 12 percent for George Bush. His approval in the Netherlands: 90 percent compared to 18 percent for Bush. His favorability rating in Europe overall (77 percent) was much higher than in America (57 percent).

Some, of course, like Dick Cheney, would argue that it doesn’t matter whether we are popular. It matters that we are safe. But, unless our plan is to continue our imperialistic ways forever, I think it does matter, and is a good thing, if other, respected countries within the global community think we are on the right track internationally. No good at all can surely come from being disliked by most of the industrialized, modern countries of the world, as we were under the last woeful administration.

This award, in truth, is not about any one thing Obama has done, for he hasn’t done much on the global stage. It’s about an ideal for a more globally connected America. And while some will cry foul and say many of  the other 200-something candidates were actually doing hard, hands-on work to promote peace, I do believe that this award says more about this country than this president, signifying the stunning reversal from the last administration’s G.I. Joe approach to foreign matters to our election of a diplomat. The Nobel Prize committee, using any rational, could never give this award to Obama based on any tangible accomplishments (and Obama admits this), but as he said, it’s a “call to action.”

Some, like this YouTube user, wrongly suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision was “apparently made just after the president took office.” (One can gauge this person’s level of credibility by noticing the channel he happens to be watching in this video.) No. In fact, nomination submissions close Feb. 1, but the choice isn’t made until October. Thus, it is true: someone nominated Obama just after his inauguration, but Obama’s leadership through these seven-eight months must have had some impact.

Regardless, as I’ve said, does he deserve it on his own merit? Probably not. And he says so himself. Is it a good thing for our country? Absolutely. John Adams, a founder whom I’m come to revere greatly, saw, not only the importance of believing in his “country,” but also recognized the importance of being respected on the world’s stage. If we aren’t, we’re cowboys. Though Cheney and Bush would seemingly have it no other way, the era of cowboys and gunslinging is long gone, and we must move with, not against or in spite of, other sovereign, modern, democratic nations.

CNN’s piece on NASA’s moon mission

Admittedly, I should be shunned and ridiculed for turning on Wolf Blitzer’s faux-news program on CNN today, but one segment about NASA’s new mission features this embarrassing, mocking and condescending piece:

What the reporter (taking liberty with that word) fails to mention is that NASA already has found water on the moon. I previously wrote about this here. The mission to blow a crater into the moon is an attempt to discover more water molecules than what can be obtained from the surface. Scientists suspect there may be more lurking underneath the surface. As I noted earlier, ice has already been found on Mars.

The presence of water, not just ice, but water molecules, in other areas of our solar system, (this is not to say what might be present in other areas of the cosmos) is a groundbreaking discovery, and with it, I feel hinges many, so far unanswered questions about our own existence, about life elsewhere, quite possibly, about religion (since so many religious texts seem to put forward the assumption that Earth is the central planet on which all else revolves). As we know, water is the central ingredient on which life can build in its most simplest form. So, the implications with this issue are, as I said before, monumental.

Silly notions about how the mission might affect ocean tides or women’s “cycles,” as the video crudely jests, can go the way of the do-do as far as I’m concerned. This is big stuff we’re dealing with and for “The Most Trusted Name in News” to air nonsense such as this says a great deal, more about the entertainment industry than about journalism. The “reporter” ends the unfortunate piece with the idiotically confident and bombastic, “CNN, New York!” which was a disingenuous way to end an already inaccurate report. As I said: embarrassing.

To add: there will be no bottled water direct from the Moon, unless, of course, those are awfully small, molecular-sized containers.

H1NI, H5NI1, panda-monium flu, anyone?

Today, or should I say yesterday, as it’s 12:23 a.m. as I write this, the World Health Organization made it official: the H1N1 virus, known as swine flu, is a pandemic. And I, for one, couldn’t be giddier. I think we actually need more frightening, and quirkily-named, diseases looming over our heads. I think it’s actually time for another, good old-fashioned bubonic plague. That’ll get folks’ attention.

The media hype over the various strains, aveon bird flu, swine flu, the duck-billed platypus flu, the panda-monium flu, you name it, is getting a bit ridiculous. Regular ‘ol flu  seems to be taking a back seat and getting a raw deal when it kills far more people than H1N1. How long have we been talking about this thing? Six months? Nine months? And in that time, we have about 145 deaths. Regular old flu kills 500,000 per year!

Howard Kurtz, speaking on May 11 of this year had this to say in response to a reader question about the media coverage of the H1N1 strain:

I have good news to report this morning. We’re not all going to die…

The tone and the volume were just out of proportion to what we knew about the outbreak. Of course it was a story that people were interested in, that journalists had to cover, that had the potential to turn into a public health crisis. But the key word is “potential.”

Even as medical reporters sounded cautionary notes, the saturation coverage turned excessive, even scary. And then, well, the thing fizzled…

I can’t tell you how many people have complained to me about what they see as the media’s wild overreaction on swine flu. Whatever short-term bump you might get in the ratings is outweighed by a loss of confidence among news consumers, and there’s no vaccine for that. — The Washington Post

But Media Matters seems to suggest the media had done its job in presenting the story about the flu strain “very well:”

The fact that half the country didn’t end up dead wouldn’t mean that the media hadn’t done it’s job. It would mean that the media had done its job very well – it had made the public aware of vital information in time for the public to act upon that information.

Is that what happened? I don’t know. But Kurtz, and many others, aren’t even considering the question of what would have happened had the media downplayed the story, or what could have happened.

Half the country didn’t die because this strain hasn’t spread enough, and it’s not near the destructor that we are led to believe it is. One hundred forty-four out of 28,000-plus is the sort of ratio that does not concern me. That amounts to 0.5 percent of those who get the H1N1 die from it. I don’t know what the same ratio for seasonal flu would be, but chances are, it’s much, much higher.  This CNN story backs up this point. And this doesn’t even mention the H5N1 virus, of which the Wall Street Journal Market Watch story said it was  “particularly deadly” but also that it was “relatively difficult to contract.” So, do I have like bite the head off an infected bird to get it or what?

Regardless, the media — and by media, I mean the news television networks, which aren’t really serious news organizations, just moneymakers and thrill-seekers and little more —in short had nothing to do with anything. Did Americans generally wash their hands more or buy some hand sanitizer and use it more from watching the news than they normally would have when this swine flu outbreak frenzy kicked in? I didn’t. Did you? Sothis is apparently the first case where WHO has declared a pandemic since the 1968 Hong Kong flu. How many did it kill? About 1 million.

A million versus 144. I’d say that’s rational.