CBC's calm approach

Following yesterday's post on OMG-WE'RE-ALL-GONNA-DIE! panic mongering, here's how the CBC pitched the news last night (from a posting by "pnjunction" on this Fark.com thread):

Just finished, here's how the CBC evening news went:

swine flu
swine flu
swine flu
tamil protest in TO
DUI manslaughter conviction
swine flu
swine flu
tamil protest in TO
pitch more swine flu coverage on late news ("how worried should you be?" I'm dying to find out!)
swine flu
sap story
a couple of arts stories
pitch more swine flu coverage on late news
sports
weather
swine flu 'update'
tamil protest in TO (I get it, university ave is closed)

That's just one dose of daily news and I'm ready to jump off of my 8th-floor balcony rather than hear about it again. Also, I feel like I am at that stupid protest (actually it's only a couple blocks away from my apt, I heard some of it earlier) after having seen all of that stock footage of it .

As Drew Curtis said, it's a potentially bad public health situation, but it's not the apocalypse, and all the media pantswetting is not helping. The CBC is not alone in this, of course, as the British media have spent the last 24 hours publicizing an off-the-cuff comment by an EU official as a formal travel warning to the US and Mexico. As Gawker put it, "Even in Mexico, the epicenter of the deadly outbreak, and home to a far, far worse health care system than we have, it's only killed 103 people. That's a lot fewer people than have been killed in the Juarez drug war this year. This is a page B-3 story that's gone all A-1."