Bird Flu

Journalists tendancy to panic and not to educate itself has meant that the coverage in bird flu has deteriorated as the week's go on.

Every week for the last few months the weekly conference around the ol' Meejit desk has wondered whether it were worthwhile for the column to criticise the profound scientific deafness that has marked most coverage of bird flu. Every week we figured, nah, it's bound to get better as journalists read themselves into the story.

What were we thinking? A combination of journalism's institutional incapacity to learn and its commercial propensity to panic means that, if anything, bird-flu coverage has steadily deteriorated. The latest nadir has been the Dead Parrot hysteria, pushed hard by (among others) The Irish Times's partner-in-pincer-movement against Independent News and Media, the Daily Mail.

Now, down deep in most newspapers, probably even the Daily Mail, there's a fact-file about bird flu that gets it mostly right. But it doesn't seem to rub off on the main reporters and headline writers. Thus, for a couple of days the parrot stories squawked that "we don't yet know if the parrot had the lethal strain" – tell that to the parrot's mother – or that the problem with H5N1 is that it "mutates easily", a breakthrough concept in biology, if it weren't so meaningless.

Then the statistics for human deaths in Asia are flung around, prompting both a false sense of menace – such deaths by H5N1 are actually pretty rare and have come over several years – and a false sense of security, since it isn't this not-very-lethal avian strain we're worried about, but a potential mutation.

Monty Python notwithstanding, dead birds are no laughing matter, for parrots and people alike. Especially given our societies' huge consumption of industrially-reared chicken, the socio-economic consequences of poultry puking or being culled are considerable.

But the widespread media-fed notion that the infected birds, wherever they pop up, are bringing a potentially decimating virus to human populations is a basic misunderstanding, and it's astonishing that it is allowed to continue. From the point of view of human health, the important thing about avian flu is not that it's "here" or "there", but the fact that it is spreading at all: the more cases there are, the more chance that the role of the dice that is genetic mutation will give rise to a virus that spreads among people. Once that happens, if that happens, it's not migrating birds that we'll be worrying about, but the world's daily millions of migratory and transitory people.

Luckily, Village readers have had scientifically literate Mike Davis to explain. He wrote here several weeks ago: "Each new outpost of H5N1 – whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam – is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans." Scary? Sure. But it's got precious little to do with a quarantined parrot.

Meanwhile, the poor old parrot is as dead as Judith Miller's New York Times career. The newspaper's coverage in recent days of its one-time star reporter, just out of prison, has been like a particularly savage cull, with a series of articles that have turned her slowly on a spit.

Miller's jail time to "protect a source" was dismissed by her colleague Maureen Dowd as a "career rehabilitation project", while a lengthy page one story documented a few of her myriad sins against journalism, eg the WMD con-job. You scarcely needed to read between the lines to gather that her colleagues and editors have despised her for years, and she has thrived thanks to the friendship of publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

While nourishing at first, roasted Miller began to have a bit of a stench. What about all the poor naïve mugs around the world who praised her as a free-press martyr on the mere say-so of, um, about 15 New York Times editorials? Breast-beating belated confessions are becoming a habit in the paper, which like the local rags that assumed a woman with Liam Lawlor must be a hooker, is exposed as a thoroughly untrustworthy institution, and a nasty, bad-tempered one too.

?More Maureen Dowd on Judith Miller, p.35