Did swine flu finally kill media credibility? It’s an exaggeration, yes, but not too much of a stretch to say that the credibility of many working in traditional media was wiped out by the horrific swine flu pandemic that tore across the world at lightening speed last week. Oh, that’s right, there was no horrific swine flu pandemic last week. I forgot.

But for most of last week, the media did all they could to terrify us. My gosh, even our Amtrak-riding Vice President was afraid to get on the subway. The problem for many journalists is not that they became fear mongers. It’s that many (most?) Americans learned that they got better information from talking to their friends or neighbors, than watching TV, listening to radio, or reading a newspaper. That’s because to get an accurate take on what was going on, you had to either read paragraph 34 of the newspaper reports or be lucky enough to hear the lonely rational expert interviewed on TV. And those regular folks — the ones who dug beyond the media scare and uncovered some accurate information — became invaluable and trusted sources of information for countless others.

Maybe the best way to put it is this: word of mouth was the best and only vaccine for swine flu media terror.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 8:06 am and is filed under Communications, Media Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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