Yes but when 30 years time?

No. Immediately.

It's a media-driven agenda to scare the bejaysus out of everyone. BSE, foot and mouth, avian flu, swine flu, campylobacter, winter vomiting bug, MRSA, e.coli.

Anyone else spot a pattern?

You mean the exact same pattern that has been present in the media since its inception? Why would the media suddenly have a giant conspiracy to keep doing the same thing it's always done? You might as well say those dirty greengrocers have started trying to sell us vegetables FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT!!!

Precisely. The mainstream media have an agenda, and it's always the same: big up any and every health scare to apocalyptic proportions. Anyone with any common sense can see straight through such frenzy, but our news organisations do love their disaster porn.

I barely take any notice of such warnings because they are overblown. People should wash their food properly and unless they have been to northern Germany have nothing to worry about. Though Big D is clearly taking huge risks living there.

I find fault in this analysis. The media's agenda is to sell adverts, disaster porn is just a marketing tool. The audience that purchases the product has choice, they can buy a decent newspaper or watch a sensible program. If they choose to consume manure instead, this is their fault.

It's the same as with politics, whiners always complain that politicians are bad and the electorate deserves better; but this also is not the case. In politics as in media there is a market, you pays your money and makes your choice. If you choose badly you get what you (collectively) deserve.

There just happen to be tens of millions of people in this country who, in spite of having been gifted a perfectly good education, simply turned out to be witless morons. They like the disaster porn, so they buy it, and they buy into the panic. Just the same as they buy tax cuts mixed with spending increases, or zero-tolerance policing mixed with massive cuts in social services.

They are [LIFTED] and they basically rule the rest of us because they seem to outnumber us all.

Turns out the cause may be linked to a restaurant in northern Germany and it's not being helped by the sanitary conditions of at least one of the hospitals inundated with some of the 1700 affected clicky

	Quote: One E.coli survivor, 41-year-old Nicoletta Pabst, told The Associated Press that sanitary conditions at the Hamburg-Eppendorf hospital were horrendous when she arrived with cramps and bloody diarrhoea. She said at least 20 others had a similar condition in the emergency room. “All of us had diarrhoea and there was only one bathroom each for men and women — it was a complete mess,” she said. “If I hadn’t been sick with E.coli by then, I probably would have picked it up over there.”

Nice.

Eat at Jurgens ten billion flies can't be wrong.

I agree, if we're talking about solely the commercial news channels. I'm referring to the BBC. This morning, they covered the story that there will be a memorial service in Westminster Abbey for the tsunami victims in Japan. While talking to their studio guest they played, quite unnecessarily, in my opinion, footage of the disaster unfolding.

That's what I mean by disaster porn. They'll play fire, explosions, crashes, natural disasters, interminably. Bigging up the scare stories around diseases and bugs is just a part of it.

I understood your DP reference, but I'm not sure I see the problem with the footage. The BBC is just like any media organisation, they compete for audience share because you aren't shackled to their service if you don't like it. So they give the audience what it likes.

The Mile High Die Club?

Sorry, that's the best I could come up with.

It's beansprouts now. They'll be blaming crispy duck by next weekend.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13662431

And by the following Monday they'll be blaming it on the boogie.

That was my first thought - Such stupidity is a real shame for the producers, but maybe my very slight gain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... sh-inquiry ?