But there may not be a cure

Please speak louder, said one of the two doctors on the panel of CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation, to the show’s anchor. This was the complete opposite of what the whole nation usually wants to say when they face news TV anchors. More substantively, the CNN-IBN show that day devoted to what the channel was calling a public health/medical emergency. What emergency? Swine flu? One death, a terribly tragic death, may be an avoidable death, and consequent public response don’t make for an emergency. But evening time, when the panels are seated and the anchors are primed, phrases like public health emergency spread faster than any virus known to epidemiology. Can this condition be precisely defined? It affects many news TV anchors across channels. The basic symptoms are rapid hand movement, rapidly advancing inability to recognise a sensible point, and rapid departure of questions from the moorings of reason. No cure has been found yet, and experts say none may be found.

So, I have a different request of news TV anchors: on stories like swine flu, will you please speak more circumspectly. People are watching and some of them may take you at face value, believing you did your homework, as journalists are supposed to, before speaking on something like this.

The CNN-IBN show saw the anchor saying the government has something to hide, which is why the private sector wasn’t being involved in testing. I am always ready to believe governments have something to hide. But not when journalists toss around claims like this just to get a rise from a talk TV panel. I found myself warming to the minister of state, health, who was on the panel and who requested TV journalists to do a bit of research before declaring that the epidemiological sky has fallen on our heads.

... contd.