The+Media's+Virus

The Media’s Virus By Evan Miller

I walked through the forgotten and vacant ghost town. These empty city ruins were all over the former US. I looked around at the once prosperous buildings of business. I saw the rust consuming the old metal supports of a building never finished because of the massive exodus out of the once populated town. I walked up to the old broadcasting station and stared. It was half caved in and the rest of it was barely hanging on. I stood there angry at what it caused this town and for that matter everywhere else in the United States. I was about 5 years ago. It was flu season and everyone around me seemed to be getting some kind of cold or illness. Summer drew near and kids that were sick stayed home and realized that they couldn’t float to summer on sick days. Eventually they were piled with work to do about 2 weeks before the summer. I was at that time a senior in high school with no worries and one thought in my head, “Just suffer until summer.” After school one day I went home and decided to flip on the news. They had a very intriguing story about a new virus that was spotted infecting people in Canada. I immediately thought of the last virus that got a lot of publicity. The last “killer” virus was the swine flu. It drove people into a little bit of a panic. This time the news was talking about the insect flu. Next week I turned on the news again and watched their story on how the insect flu was spreading. The virus just started invading Washington. The media started talking about the horrible effects of the virus and how it has started killing people in Washington. Soon the virus started spreading all over the western United States. The media kept drilling crazy stories about deaths from the insect flu into all of the public’s heads. This constant drilling of death rates into the people’s heads started a panic. People in Washington started evacuating and leaving their homes behind. Everyone started moving east. They were constantly stopped at places along the way to check if they had the virus. If they did they were forced to stay to the west. This large scale exodus left the buildings and everyone who was sick to die. The west of the US was not the same. The overpopulation of the east started to make people uptight and angry, some of them leaving the US all together. The USA started losing people left and right to people fleeing the country, not to the insect virus. It wasn’t until a year after the insect flu was a threat that people started realizing that the insect flu was not a rapid killer. The media over exaggerated most of the virus’ facts and left the public panicky. It was too late to fix the media’s mistake, the damage was done. Currently people are starting to slowly return to the west. The media is under close watch by people with the real facts to ensure that nothing like this happens again. For right now the towns of the west are still vacant and falling apart. What a shame that we couldn't think for ourselves and relied on the media. This media story just got way to out of hand and effected us in a critical way. The virus was not that harmful to begin with, but the media definitely made it sound like a killer. I knew that the virus was not a big deal, but I couldn't broadcast my opinion. The media could. Now I am left wondering the old and forgotten roads that run through the empty towns that used to be prosperous. I never caught the virus, but everyone else did. They caught the real virus. The media virus.