Stuff Journalists Like – #25 Pandemics

Maybe it was SARS for some or Bird Flu for
others. Whatever pandemic it is, journalists always remember their first one.

 Journalists like to cover pandemics because there
is a chance they are covering the end of the world, and Armageddon is the
ultimate story any journalist can ask for.

Pandemics always make for sensational coverage. 

When covering a pandemic, journalists are reminded of
the immense power they possess when it comes to covering such events. With one
stroke of the keyboard that mentions “swine flu” and “pandemic” in the same
sentence, thousands of people go into panic mode. 

Before the ink dries on reader’s hands, or the glow of the computer/TV screen
fades, they have barricaded themselves in their homes wearing gas masks and
purging all their pork products. Like a terrorist alert, journalists report the
rising threat level of pandemics as they watch with glee as their web-hits got
through the roof.

Covering pandemics also gives journalists the opportunity to play doctor for a
day, temporarily pleasing their parents, who had hopes for their son
or daughter to be a doctor or lawyer or a cabbie (anything with a steady
income).

In the midst of an outbreak, journalists busy themselves so much covering the
latest infection numbers, they often don’t have time to report on the number of
people not infected (or the fact that 30,000 Americans die of the regular,
boring flu annually).

Pandemics for journalists mean endless content, removing the need to come up
with anything original.

When it comes to covering a pandemic, much like natural disasters, journalists
find themselves at ground zero.

As governments ban flights and travel to certain regions or countries,
journalists in jeans and a t-shirt find themselves headed straight to the
“outbreak” zone trying to find the source of the disease right along with
government officials in full-body Hazmat suits. Putting their own lives in
peril, journalists travel to the heart of the infected region, where 99.9
percent of the world is petrified to even look at on a map, to report the
story.

But the clinch of covering a good old pandemic is giving the plague disease a
snazzy, catchy name, especially ones that include the names of animals that
people have daily contact with like Bird Flu. Journalists want to thank
scientists for the H1N1 suggestion but it doesn’t have quite the ring like
Swine Flu.

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Topics:

list of pandemics, list of world pandemics, old pandemics, pandemics