WHO are we? WHO, WHO. WHO, WHO? I really wanna know...
Having been working on the development of Pandemic planning software, I feel reasonably adequately informed when it comes to Pandemic planning procedures and categorisation. Thus, when I saw Wikipedia reporting the outbreak as "declared a pandemic by the [WHO]" it made me think about just how atrocious the reporting on this incident has actually been.
Modern media seems more and more biased towards letting the 'people' make their own minds up... or having journalists speak as though they are experts in a field after two hours of research. This has come about partially because any mention of the word 'research' or 'science' is automatically taken as a mistruth, especially in the health field.
The reputation of scientists (in any field) in the media has become so terrible that people actually trust the happy smiley morning show hosts over a Cambridge expert who has spent his entire life specialising in this field.
Whilst there's a lot to be said against the media, this strikes me as the result of a lack of moral fibre amongst scholars in general who now see lying as a necessary part of surviving the Capitalist system. It has become difficult to quote statistics in everyday conversation because such statements are immediately dismissed as bending the truth, even when they are still relevant.
When modern media and modern research clash integrity seems to go out of the window faster than [insert metaphor here] and the end result is that mass media is now considered such a poor outlet of reliable information that people trust Wikipedia as a source of scientific information over the BBC... and it strikes me that it is, in fact, reasonable to do so.
I leave you with this:
"Despite no evidence that the virus is present in swine anywhere in the world, Egypt's parliament called for the nation's 250,000 pigs to be killed immediately" -Wikipedia
Modern media seems more and more biased towards letting the 'people' make their own minds up... or having journalists speak as though they are experts in a field after two hours of research. This has come about partially because any mention of the word 'research' or 'science' is automatically taken as a mistruth, especially in the health field.
The reputation of scientists (in any field) in the media has become so terrible that people actually trust the happy smiley morning show hosts over a Cambridge expert who has spent his entire life specialising in this field.
Whilst there's a lot to be said against the media, this strikes me as the result of a lack of moral fibre amongst scholars in general who now see lying as a necessary part of surviving the Capitalist system. It has become difficult to quote statistics in everyday conversation because such statements are immediately dismissed as bending the truth, even when they are still relevant.
When modern media and modern research clash integrity seems to go out of the window faster than [insert metaphor here] and the end result is that mass media is now considered such a poor outlet of reliable information that people trust Wikipedia as a source of scientific information over the BBC... and it strikes me that it is, in fact, reasonable to do so.
I leave you with this:
"Despite no evidence that the virus is present in swine anywhere in the world, Egypt's parliament called for the nation's 250,000 pigs to be killed immediately" -Wikipedia