There was a time one month back when there was not a news bulletin on the Indian TV channels which did not mention swine flu. It was at a time when the cases worldwide had plateaued. Let us put the whole issue into perspective.
6050 people have been affected with the swine flu in India out of which 173 died (as of 13 September 2009). Most of the people who have been infected are ones who either had been abroad or had been in contact with someone who had been abroad. In simply words, it was predominantly among the more affluent. And that is exactly the reason it managed to get such a proportion of prime time coverage in the media. The media houses catering to this stratum of the society went into ‘emergency’ mode.
I would have been happy with the media’s vociferous take on swine flu if they had not been turning a blind eye to the Indians dying every minute due to TB or to the 1250 Indians dying daily because of diarrhea-related diseases, both of which are very much curable. The media do not see such ‘uninteresting’ statistics.
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Right information in the wrong place is misinformation or even, disinformation
Stung by the "Sainath bug"? There are more Indians dying of hunger / starvation and malnutrition than those dying of diseases. Who cares?
As a power system engr I would say, "Pay attention to the pure sine-wave but shout when you see a spike on it". H1N1 was a spike. Uncommon and hence, it was "new" information. The sine-wave which existed for ages is not new information. Opportunists like Sainath would cry foul. They would say “When you have a sine wave of magnitude 325V varying at such a fast rate of 50 times a second and which has been in existence for long, it is the spike that gets attention though its magnitude is hardly 10V whereas the sine-wave magnitude is almost 7 times that of the spike!”- He would sure flood us with with useless data!
Media does bring out issues on deaths due to TB, diarrhoea-related cases and of the health departments' lack of concern, but to most readers it is "not news". Had the media turned a blind eye to H1N1, the same fault-finders would have bashed it for not showing concern.
Apart from juggling with deceitful statistics, Sainath seems to be passing on to his followers a more deadly weapon which was hitherto confined to the hands of politicos (these days they seem to be more comfortable with minorities, castes and reservations) - deriding the rich. Of late it has become fashionable to scoff at the middle and upper classes.
Shouting "media showed this but did not bother about that" and presenting "statistics" that compare "this with that", though "this" and "that" have nothing to do with each other, has become the trend among some shrewd opportunists and time-servers who aim to grab public attention in almost every misfortune. These "statistics" are nothing but irrelevant misleading information - mostly juxtapositions of information pertaining to unrelated events, skilfully presented so as to shackle and tame the listeners' thoughts. It is information when in the right place but disinformation, even if true, when in the wrong place.
These practices are now commonplace. They have become banal and trite through overuse. However, "statisticians" continue to mushroom.
Sunil S Damodhar
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