Hantasteria

I've always found the priorities and obsessions of the corporate media to be bizarre, but this past week they've really outdone themselves. Every major news network's web site has featured prominently, every day, a section with multiple stories on the attack on the White House Correspondent's Dinner. The guy was a lone actor, who didn't even make it to the same floor as the event, and there was essentially no new news about it of any kind after the next day. This was an incident of no importance, but it had to do with them, so they wanted the rest of us to be obsessed with it as well. Give it a rest, please.

Now we're seeing six stories every day about the hantavirus, which I assure you is a total nothingburger. There are disease outbreaks on cruise ships all the time. You have a lot of people in close quarters, usually most of them pretty old so their immune systems are declining, and obviously any virus that makes it onto the ship is likely to spread. Norovirus is a very common problem, for example. Hantavirus is very unlikely to be transmitted from human to human, about the only places it's going to happen are a cruise ship and maybe a prison, where people are cooped up in close quarters for a long time. This is not a problem for anybody except the few people who became infected.  There is no possibility, zero, zip, zilch, nada that it is going to become any sort of an epidemic. 

 

Meanwhile, there actually are some important developments in the world that they probably ought to be telling us about.