I'm relieved to be able to say that my daughter is recovering from something that turned out not to be swine flu at the moment. She's been fully tuned into the news coverage of the illness over the last few days. Despite my best efforts to switch over when the news started on either the TV or radio, I had not planned for the hourly mini-bulletins that they now have on BBC1. This meant that at least a couple of times on Thursday she got to hear that 65,000 people in the UK are going to die in this pandemic, and today she got to hear all about the woman who died after giving birth - and whose baby died too.
Given that a lot of kids seem to be getting this strain of the flu - and that they will mainly be sitting at home bored out of their heads watching TV, I do wonder whether the editors of the news bulletins could be slightly more sensitive to the fact that their audience might be utterly terrified by the way the spread of the illness is being covered in the "headline bulletins".
At work the team that I work in often fight long and hard to represent the "needs of our audience" - protecting them, we think, from the long milkshake straw of the unscrupulous salesperson (that probably sounds a bit idiotic given that I work for a marketing company . . . but anyway . . . can't be arsed to have that tautological debate with myself at the moment). Today I feel like I need to protect my daughter from the scaremongering, hysteria-hopeful news editors just as dilligently. Topsy turvey times.
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