"We're All Going to Die Horribly!"

They couldn't let it lie, could they? I'm referring to the media, of course and its fixation on contagious diseases. Despite their best efforts a couple of years ago, bird flu stubbornly refused to become a pandemic, and all their predictions of a plague-induced doomsday came to nothing. It really must have been galling for the media, after all the effort they put into scaremongering and trying to scare the bejasus out of the public, to have to look on impotently as the bird flu threat fizzled out. So the tone of unalloyed glee which accompanied the first reports of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico, is hardly surprising. "We're all going to die horribly" is once again the order of the day. Best of all, from the media's point of view, there have already been reported cases of swine flu amongst humans in 'civilised' countries like the US and Britain. After all, who gives a damn if some Mexican peasants drop dead after shagging infected pigs? I mean, what do they expect if they insist on living in conditions of extreme poverty and abject shite? Or at least, that's what the British press would like to say, if they could only get away with it. Whilst not wishing to down play the seriousness of the swine flu outbreak, I can't help but feel that the relentless scaremongering of the media is going to be far worse and more difficult to endure than any pandemic.

As if pig borne plagues weren't bad enough, the press are still trying to ramp up the terrorist 'threat', despite the lack of any identifiable threat. Not that this lack of apparent threat deters the press from obediently trumpeting the security services' latest triumph in foiling some terror plot or other, the details of which are never clear. In fact, the details are inevitably so vague that no charges are ever brought against the alleged conspirators (who, more often than not, are foreign students), although that doesn't stop the Home Office from deporting them. Even reading the 'wrong' books can now be grounds for incarceration, it seems. Possession of literature espousing supposedly 'extreme' views was enough to get one group of alleged terrorists arrested prior to the G20 conference. The police claimed they might have been plotting to disrupt the meetings and had explosive devices - which turned out to be fireworks. But perhaps the most blatant piece of terror-related scaremongering came on my local TV news programme today, when it was reported that police were implementing new security measures to prevent terrorists from using shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles against passenger aircraft flying in and out of Gatwick Airport. Of course, they belatedly added, after ramping up the alleged threat posed by these missile-wielding terrorists, there is no actual intelligence suggesting that anyone is actually planning to do this. For fuck's sake, what's wrong with the press these days?