The News Business

Not so long ago, the whole world was in red alert because of the inminent threat of pandemia by the H5N1 virus, the bird flu. For several months the bird flu invaded our media every single day; newspapers, magazines, tv news, documentaries, virtually each and every piece of media was infected by the bird flu, even recipes magazines explained how it was or wasn´t a risk to eat chiken. Fear spreaded through the world, and many people was geting ready for the flu that was going to kill 1.2 billion human beings.

But time passed, and as we started to get used to live with one more fear in our lives, the number of entries in the media about the bird flu gradually diminish. It diminished in such subtle manner, that I hadn't even thought about it util a couple of weeks ago. I asked myself, How is it possible that a such an apocaliptic danger can be just forgotten? People don't talk about it anymore. No news come out anymore. Why? I couldn´t understand. I cannot believe that one day we were on the verge of loosing 1/5 of the worlds population and the next, nobody would remember. I and many more people, arrived to a conclusion.

Corporative mass media were probably having a lack of news at the time, or not even that, they just took a chance to boost their incomes. They made all the profit they could while they could keep the fear level high enough, selling us magazines, giving us documentaries and shows to watch, etc., and they simply moved on to other news. This leaves another question. Are we so short-memory, simple minded and manipulable? I don´t think we are so dumb to believe that such a threat can appear and dissapear in a second. What really happens is that they take good care to worry our minds, and occupy the space one new was taking with another. And we just don´t remember. We just don´t think about it again. They are just playing with our emotions. We have to become good players to be able to see their bluffs. How? Finding our own information.

But, could there be any more reasons for the avian flu media bombardment? Did anyone else make profit out of this? Absolutely yes. We´ll discuss this next.