Bloggasm

In this week’s NPR’s On the Media, co-host Brooke Gladstone interviewed NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who has written about past disasters, most notably in his 2002 book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Gladstone asked him about the media’s coverage of the recent swine flu outbreaks, and during this interview Klinenberg told this anecdote:

Well, my favorite story, in fact, involves The New York Daily News, which sent one of their reporters around the streets of Manhattan in a surgical mask and they had him cough to see what kind of attention he would whip up. [BROOKE LAUGHS] And, of course, lots of people looked and thought, this is a weird thing.

But the best part of the story is that there was a British TV crew that had come the United States to capture how Americans were responding to this enormous outbreak of swine flu, and they stopped the guy and said they wanted to film him.

So here – [BROOKE LAUGHS] – this is a defining moment of a media event. It should be taught in media studies courses for eternity. You get the reporter who becomes the symbol of how Americans are acting, even though no one else on the streets is doing this.

So let’s review. A news outlet, unsatisfied that there isn’t enough panic in the streets due to swine flu, sets out to create panic about the outbreak on its own. And in the process of trying to create panic gets targeted by another news outlet who is out in the streets searching for panicked Americans.

Klinenberg is correct, when a historian writing on early 21st century epidemics covers the swine flu, this story will nicely represent the vapidness of the media when it comes to covering disaster situations