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I'm Roger Simpson.
I'm a professor of communication.
I've been on the University of Washington faculty since 1973.
Much of my work is in journalism education
but I also teach other courses in the communication field.
The media have always served, when they do their work well,
as alarms for us. They tell us there are emergencies or disasters
or something to respond to quickly.
My sense is that the media, since April, nationally and locally,
have been doing a good job of ringing the alarm bell.
You think back to colonial times, or the frontier experience.
When a fire started, or some other kind of disaster occurred,
somebody was gonna ring that bell, loud and clear.
And so, to the credit of the news media, it seems to me, the bell was rung in mid-April,
loud and clear, and the evidence is that Americans have responded to that alarm
very effectively.
Electronic media, that we have now, have placed the user of information,
the person seeking information, especially about health topics,
I think, in a much stronger relationship than has ever been the case.
It is now possible for any one of us to go directly to the CDC and,
assuming that the CDC is posting the most accurate information available, and I think
that's the case. We can know what the CDC knows.
We can know what the World Health Organization knows.
We can go to the website of the King County Health Department
and know what folks downtown understand about this disease.
That wasn't the case.
We've had two pandemics in the last 60 years prior to this.
One in 1957, one in 1968.
In neither of those years was it possible for any of us, who were either ill or
frightened of becoming ill, to go to a national, county, or
international agency and learn exactly where things are on this.
The news and media are giving us some good sources.
I recall one day recently, when, I think, one of the newspaper websites listed
and provided the links directly to the CDC, to the World Health Organization,
to the King County Health Department, to other agencies that have this information.
Yes, there are a lot of people contributing their own experiences and reflections and
perhaps erroneous observations about things.
We do have to use some common sense in sorting out these sources.
So again, I complement the major media, these fading mainstream media,
for at least telling us where to go for the best possible information.
But there are no guarantees that we're gonna be smart enough to
keep our eyes on the right sources.
Journalism has an opportunity to recast itself in terms of
our major and best source of information about health issues.
What it's doing now is focusing on those three most important,
in the public mind anyway, diseases:
cancer, health disease, diabetes, I think, and perhaps ***. AIDs is a fourth topic.
Health is a broad umbrella that covers many, many, many kinds of
personal effects, illnesses, diseases, as well as lifestyle, social relationships,
all kinds of things.
And if, both journalists in training and the journalist in the field,
had additional resources to focus their attention on that complex area,
we would all benefit. But, I think the reality is that
the industry is losing the capacity to do that.
Journalism schools will, slowly perhaps, respond to that but not very fast,
and so the answer may lie best
in public awareness of how to find the right information
to deal with particular health and illness issues.
There is an emotional side to the swine flu pandemic that
we're not paying much attention to.
It's not the same as a traumatic stress that I'm more familiar with,
where a sudden unexpected event, like an earthquake, or a car crash
kind of effects your brain and nervous ability to respond to incidents.
The story of the swine flu pandemic has done something a little different.
It'*** the emotion of fear and anxiety,
which may be connected to traumatic experiences, but not necessarily.
But, the news of that possibility has left some people alarmed
for themselves, of course, for family members, and friends.
There is a sense that appears from surveys,
that a high percentage of us expect to have the flu which is probably
unrealistic given past flu experiences.
So, there is an emotional side to this that we can't address very well.
It relates to how much personal support we
have within our families, within our network of friends, within our work places.
It relates to our capacity to share a feeling of
that flu is a fairly common thing in life experience,
even though this one may be more severe than last year's flu,
and the year before and so on.
So, there will be some emotional reactions and some people will be frightened and
some people will be alarmed and exaggerate the potential effects.
Some of that is reasonable, in view of the threat.
Some of it is overstated and over reaction.
If you have access to some good information, it will help,
but, I think, I'm not sure, that websites always solve the problem of nervous
anticipation of something or fear or anxiety or dread or even something like panic.
What we learned in the trauma field is that we survive and emerge from
traumatic experiences best if we have support, human support,
support from friends, coworkers, family and so on.
And that may be part of the answer in this case too,
if we can; help each other, and work our way through, and calm ourselves down,
be realistic about what is happening, and find some adequate sources of information.