James Robert Kelley

WARNING:  If you don’t care for conspiracy theory or material of a pluto nature, stop reading.

I noticed a news story on the Fox News website titled “Mexico Links Sickness, Deaths to Swine Flu.” It caused my tin-foil meter to rise when I read:

All seven U.S. victims recovered from a strain of the flu that combines pig, bird and human viruses in a way that researchers have not seen before.

That alone made me wonder if the virus was engineered or weaponized.  The article goes on to state that the flu virus has claimed at least 16 people so far in Mexico, so it has potential to be deadly.  The virus is communicable, as seen from the following statement:

The U.S. cases are a growing medical mystery because it’s unclear how they caught the virus. The CDC said none of the seven people were in contact with pigs, which is how people usually catch swine flu. And only a few were in contact with each other.

Considering it is a combination of several flu viruses, including avian and human, the virus is different than traditional swine flu.  This could account for the infection rate, but the nature of the various strains that constitute the virus is even more puzzling if it were naturally occurring:

CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen in people or pigs before. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.

Viruses will combine and form new strains if a host is infected with more than one strain.  Let’s say a pig is infected with the swine flu, has contact with humans and eats a bird; you could see a naturally occurring strain containing components from each variant.  The last part of the quote above makes this exceptionally improbable event seem impossible.  The swine flu is actually composed of variants from North America, Europe and Asia.  Little piggies traveling to three continents to get infected seem unlikely.

After digesting that information I started to wonder the source of such a virus.  The next quote gave me a clue:

The cases were detected under unusual circumstances. One was seen at a Navy clinic that participates in a specialized disease detection network, and the other was caught through a specialized surveillance system set up in border communities, CDC officials said.

Don’t go looking in the article for that quote, it isn’t there.  When I first read the article I read the quote, and started thinking about how both cases were detected via government programs.  One being a Navy clinic and the other part of a specialized surveillance system set up in border communities.  Both of these would seem to have connections to military or security infrastructure.  Both were also have connections to research facilities that would be capable of altering virus genetics.

The fact that you won’t find this information in the article indicates someone was unhappy that the information was there.  It was removed quickly, because by the time a link to the article was read by a friend the information was removed.  Here is a screen shot of the article as it stands while this blog post if being written:

Not wanting to look like a raving fool for suggesting that Fox News would remove information that could indicate the source of the virus, I attempted to find the original text.  There was one version still existing on the Internet according to Google, the image below is a screen shot after a search for +border “strain of the flu that combines pig, bird and human viruses in a way that researchers have not seen before” on Google:

I took a string from the current article, and added +border to make sure only articles with the original text was displayed.  WJZ.com had the same content as the original with a different title: Rare Swine Flu Kills 16 In Mexico, Sickens 7 In U.S. It looks like they did not get the memo.  Just in case they do, here is a screen shot of the article:

Why would they remove interesting information so quickly, unless they were commanded to remove the information by someone who saw it as a potential risk?

Attached is the Internet Explorer “Save As” copied pages of the two sites, zipped.  They are only here in case the sites change more and you want to be able to reference how the content was when this blog post was written:

foxnews_com-mexico-links-sickness-deaths-to-swine-flu-cold-flu

In a previous post about the media failing to keep up with real-time news and introducing errors in their reporting, I suggested that the media stop trying and just wait long enough to be able to reflect on the news.

Here is another possible option: if the media insist on real-time reporting, instead of letting people look at commonly available real-time stats for themselves, they could introduce “IF THEN Reporting.”

The idea behind IF THEN Reporting is to make use of common web development techniques to modify their stories on the fly.  They could write their articles in the following manner:

echo “It was a “;

If(DOW.today < DOW.yesterday) {

     echo “bad”;

} else {

     echo “good”;

}

echo “ day in trading.”;

This would not add any more truth to their reporting, but at least it would always be reflective of the current state of affairs.

NOTE: I’m being sarcastic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the media doing this in the future.

While an English professor would see declining grammatical quality in blogs and text messages as a major offence, the public is generally accepting.  My posts tend to be written within a couple minutes and may be a shining example of stupidity.

While illiteracy is common, until recently a typo or other error in a newspaper would have caused a major reaction.  The quality of newspapers transitioned into online articles, with Associated Press articles reprinted on Fox News, CNN and other websites.

Recently even the old media in the new world has started to slip.  Each day for the last several days I have noticed omitted words, misspellings and even place holders intended for additional information slipping past the editors.

The decline in quality could be related to the TXT’ing generation moving into the media, but I think the problem is a symptom of a general shift in business.  I assert bad apples were always in the pool of writers, but the editors were a strong bunch who could weed out the errors.  Recently editors have taken a sideline to rapid delivery of the news.

An example of rapid delivery would be news articles related to volatility in the stock market.  I watch the up and down motion of the market via Google Finance.  Google Finance lists articles that appear to have been posted near shifts in trading.  While this can be very handy to get perspective on what is changing throughout the day, it causes the news sources to be quick to post.

An example of real-time news reporting failure at the moment of writing.

These quick posts often become outdated before they are published.  A typical article will explain the market is down, while the market is making a quick recovery.  When the writers rejoice over a major upswing in the market, the real-time quotes will show major losses.  The speed of change and the inability to accurately report on real-time events renders any real-time analysis pointless.

My opinion is the real-time reporting is not news, but more of a sports announcer talking in delay.  I suggest the news industry would better serve their readers if the writers would take a breath and report the news only after there is something to report.  This would allow the writers to reflectfully dig deeper, and give the editors something to do again.