Ilana-Davita commented on my recent post about U.S. President Obama’s speech in Cairo that it was “all the more interesting and insightful as you waited a bit before writing it.”
This has been a habit of mine for some time. While many people are addicted to CNN and up-to-the-minute news briefs, I tend to avoid news stories about events that are less than two or three days old. At first blush, there is often little in the way of fact in a news story. A reporter gets hold of a story and, where the facts are uncertain, uses speculation and surmise to flesh it out. This was what happened back in the early 1990s when I read an article in the Oregonian about a Black man who had been found hanging from a noose in Idaho. (For those not in the know, Idaho is the home of several compounds of white supremacists.) Appearances suggested that it had been a lynching, reminiscent of the Sunday afternoon sport that used to be common in the South in the early 20th century, when the cops didn’t go after the Ku Klux Klan because most of the cops were IN the Ku Klux Klan. A few days later, however, I was lucky enough to be combing through the back pages of the paper and found a correction to the earlier story. It turns out that the dark-skinned person found in the noose was an Iranian student, and it was judged a suicide rather than a lynching.
Mind you, that’s a big difference—a lynching of a Black man versus the suicide of a Middle Eastern kid a long way from home.
It’s also why I was one of the few Israeli bloggers I knew of who kept mum about the swine flu. While news sources were touting this as the new Spanish Influenza, bloggers lapped it up and wrote about how scared they were of what was to come. It turns out that swine flu carries no extraordinary symptoms and has not resulted in any more morbidity than the regular ol’ garden-variety flu that circulates in one form or another each winter. (The regular flu kills 36,000 people per year—no small sum—yet that isn’t on a pandemic list.)
I can’t claim any greater wisdom than the average citizen. But I do understand that sometimes the urge to get the scoop doesn’t always result in accurate details. I understand that sensationalism attracts readers. And I understand that since the job of most of the media is not to inform the public, but to sell customers to advertisers, they don’t necessarily have my best interests at heart. Just ’cause it’s in print don’t make it true.
And besides all that, I read very slowly, take a long time to answer sometimes, and don’t scare easily. These serve me well when processing the stuff that comes out labeled “news.”
Shimshonit 
I don’t know that you are correct about swine flu. So far it has not caused much harm, but the WHO remains concerned. Because it is new and so few are yet immune, it has the potential of mutating quickly and becoming much more lethal. No one knows what will happen, but it is too early to say that the hype has been overblown.
Mom in Israel: I agree that a wait-and-see attitude toward the swine flu should still be operating policy. But it is also true that there have been discussions about the WHO rewriting their definition of a pandemic taking into account not just geographical spread, but severity of the disease, largely in response to the phenomenon of swine flu (see this article). This virus behaves differently from other viruses, but it’s not clear that it will have a greater death toll than the ordinary flu.