Everywhere you go, you can see and here in one form or another people getting all hyped up or joking about the "Swine Flu" or as I refer to it as the "Pork Scare."

This weekend was an interesting one. It seems as though a Catholic church in the Orlando area encouraged the attenders that they had in their mass to not shake hands with other people attending. My church, First Baptist Orlando did not go to that extreme, but were planning on practicing the regular safe guards, which is nothing out of the ordinary. If I was making an executive decision on the matter, I would have gone with the option that my church took. I believe that people are extremely over reacting to this swine flu scare. People do not get this hyped up over the regular flu each year.

The Media and Communications Pastor of First Baptist Orlando, Scott Link was interviewed by two news networks here in Orlando on Sunday morning. Scott answered their questions honestly of what our church in regards to the Swine Flu. The interview aired during the Sunday evening news. One network quoted him correctly the other network misquoted him completely. If you listened to the interview, you would blatently see that was not the point Scott was making. This is a prime example of how the networks misquote and mislead their audiences. Is that what you want from your news networks?

I remember a couple of years preceding the turn of the century when the media was sending everyone into a panic about every computer system, government and banking computers systems were going to crash at the turn of the century. This caused many people to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in preparation for it...in buying food for week/months and taking precautions to prepare for a long outage of food and supplies. Corporations spend thousands if not more dollars to become Y2K compliant...reconfigured databases and software systems all for something the media was getting the audience all hyped up for. What happened when the clock turned from December 31st, 1999 at 23:59 to January 1st, 2000 at 00:00, absolutely nothing. Power was still on, money was in everyone's bank account and computer systems still functioned. So what was the scare for? Did we over react?

I think we did. The media continued to push a non-threat so much that the American people started being concerned. They recommended many things to do and in reality we did not have to do anything. It could have been another nice new year.

I think this swine flu is the same thing. The liberal end of the media is totally over reacting. Since they choose to not give a balanced report on what is really happening is Washington, they have to dig and dig for some sort of story to blow out of proportion. It was Bush, picking him apart piece by piece. They arrogantly selectively report specific things about Obama. Do not give the truth about what he is doing, destroying, or other leaders he is bowing to, this leads the media to dig into something that is not really a threat to get a reaction out of the people. So explain to me how this is supposed to be the most transparents administration ever if the American people are being lied to?

-Ken

Labels: church, First Baptist Church Orlando, Media, over reacting, scare, Scott Link, swine flu, virus, Y2K