You know, to my way of thinking, there has GOT to be a better way of handling things.

What just happened to us? And, when I say “us” I mean all of the citizens of the world.

We just went through a huge, world wide scare, with many folks believing that a large number of us were about to be wiped out.

The hot and scary topic for the past two weeks has been Swine Flu. It was supposed to be the flu to end all flus. It was going to kill us all. Some people were saying that it was going to rival the great flu pandemic of 1918 that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people world wide.

Here in Connecticut, the largest newspaper in the state, The Hartford Courant, even ran a front page article on the 1918 pandemic in the Sunday Edition.

The evening news, local and national, made Swine Flu their lead story every night for a week. Schools closed. Respirator masks were flying off the shelves. Joe Biden wouldn’t get on an airplane. TamiFlu was the hottest item behind the prescription counter. People were cancelling trips in order to avoid crowds. School districts shut down schools. We were convinced that this one was going to be “the BIG one!”

And then yesterday, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta issued a press release that said, “Whoops! Our bad! It ain’t so bad after all!” Come to find out, after studying the virus for a while, doctors have come to the conclusion that it is a very mild strain of flu.

Two people have died in the U.S. after contracting the disease, and both of those poor folks had other medical problems that contributed to their deaths. Out of the hundreds of confirmed cases of the disease in the U.S. not a single one of them had to be hospitalized.

Man! It’s SO HARD to get a good pandemic these days!

So what caused all the terror and expense and hardship related to this “outbreak?”

Personally, I cannot blame the CDC in Atlanta. They were doing their job. They discovered a new disease that was a potential problem, and they reported it. That’s what they are supposed to do. And it is always prudent to err on the side of caution.

Perhaps it was unwise for them to use the word pandemic because of the horrible connotations of the word, but, other than that, these doctors and scientists cannot and should not be blamed for the major upheaval in our lives that this episode created.

The news media, on the other hand, should be hung out to dry over this thing. Not so much the national news, which seemed to really try to be even-handed about it and not cause wide-spread panic. However, the local news, at least here in Connecticut, should all be taken out and shot.

Every evening, men and women with microphones in front of them and “deer-in-the-headlights” expressions on their faces stood out in front of hospital emergency rooms just looking for people with watery eyes and the sniffles. They were also outside of schools that were closed for days because some pimply-faced little tot who attended classes there sneezed after eating a taco in a Mexican restaurant!

(Man! Orson Wells would have loved this! The War of Worlds hysteria had NOTHING on this!)

We used to call this kind of sensational journalism “Yellow Journalism”, and it was looked upon with distain by those who considered themselves true journalists. Nowadays, these blown-out-of-all-reasonable-proportions “news” stories are daily occurrences, particularly with. the local newscasts.

(In comparison to local news stories about this "pandemic", The National Inquirer's stories about Bat Boy and alien abductions seem entirely plausible.)

Almost everybody I talked to about the swine flu thought that the media was over-reacting. However, the constant bombardment of the topic did wear people down to the point where they were getting fairly concerned.

Remember, these local news people are the same folks who come on the air at dinner time in the winter to warn us all about the Mother of All Snow Storms that is going to kill us all tomorrow. In Connecticut, we had about seven of those last year. Ho-hum!

Why does the news media do it? I think because it keeps people tuning in. And when more people tune in, television ratings go up. When THAT happens, the stations can charge more for commercial minutes. Thus, they make a lot of money hyping wanna-be disasters, and scaring the living bejesus out of all of their viewers.

So the local television stations gain from frightening us. However, they also lose something by it; they lose credibility. But hey! What’s credibility? We’re talking Big Bucks News here!

It is a shame that they cannot be held accountable for their actions.

I think all “terror-journalists” should be rounded up and waterboarded on live television by Walter Cronkite.