World Health Organisation Warning Issued

The World Health Organisation today issued a warning about the possibility of a world pandemic of Media Flu. A spokeswoman said ‘At first a few local newspaper and TV channels in Mexico began to report flu cases in La Gloria. This was spread through media contact to the national Mexican media, and before anyone had the chance to put in place measures to contain it, it spread through the nearby US media and then out into the rest of the world’s media. It now seems that the media is most countries is infected with a very virulent strain of Media Flu.

She went on to outline the symptoms of Media Flu Hysteria (to give it it’s full medical name). ‘It starts,’ she said, ‘with highly contagious panic fuelled by high-temperature hysteria which then leads to uncontrollable speculation by the media with a constant need to issue updates, usually with a wild disregard of evidence and fact. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to the media coming to sometimes fatal conclusions.’

[This morning’s newspaper front pages]

A research scientist, Labrat Methodology, who has studied these outbreaks of Media Flu for many years, said

the media seems inherently prone to these outbreaks of hysteria, look at what happened with Asian Bird Flu, SARS, the Credit Crunch, Javanese Housemaid's Knee, to name just a few. Also, don’t forget the media’s recent collective Obamagasm over the election of the new American president. It was almost as if the Media expected him to begin walking on water as soon as the inauguration was over. However, when he turned out to be just another politician they did eventually get over it. We can only hope that this latest media obsession is just as short lived.

The WHO issued a warning to the general public to avoid all non-essential contact with the media, especially those parts of it known to be infected with Media Flu, until the highly-contagious period of panic naturally subsides. The warning said that members of the public should try to avoid any media that may be infected with Media Flue Hysteria. The symptoms to look out for, it says, are where the media constantly issues stories and updates about the flu, mainly through articles about what the symptoms are, how many will die, how there is no cure and so on, with recycles endless panicky articles and pieces about not panicking.

The spokeswoman added: ‘the media’s constant unthinking sensationalism and its seeming need to constantly exaggerate the significance of everything it reports upon, creates an hysteria that the media itself feeds upon and amplifies again, creating a feedback loop of mounting never-ending sensationalism, unless something happens to break that loop.’

However, most experts do say that Media Flu will die down of its own accord after a few days, or weeks, at the most, when the media discovers some new bright shiny thing to occupy its attention.

Labrat Methodology concurs :

Luckily the media’s self-obsession and self-absorption mean that it believes that events only occur in the world if the media reports on them. Consequently, there are many scientists around the world; including at my own laboratory, who are busy working on a vaccine that we hope will inject several celebrity sex stories and high political scandals directly into the media’s attention. We hope this will divert the media’s attention away from hyping up its pandemic hysteria any further, and this will cause the fuss to all die down sooner rather than later.