CNBC Two-Way Street
RSS FEED
- Links: More Important Than We May Think
- Changing What Was Said
- Radio Rounds: A Job Loss and Education
- A Big Net Deal: Getting Staff's Attention
- Site Hot Links? Fear and Greed
- Balloon Boy: Not Your Average Business Story
- Hot Items: Gold, Gifts and Gritty Prison Fights
- Hot Links for Monday
- Swine Flu By Any Other Name ... Like H1N1
MOST SHARED
- Nielsen Ratings Coming to Video Games
- Time Lapse World Series Is A Great Play
- Oil Next Week
- The Week Ahead
- 'New Moon' Midnight Showings Earn Record $26.3 Million
- Twilight, Inc., A Worldwide Craze
- Hot Topics at TEDMED
- Bove: Expect Goldman To Increase Dividend Meaningfully
- Hershey Mulls $17 Billion Bid for Cadbury: Source
- Confessions of a Black Friday Shopper
- Time to Buy Treasurys?
- Lightning Round: Las Vegas Sands, ADC Telecom, Satyam Computer and More
- Lightning Round OT: Knight Capital, Ebix and More
- Is Lear, Back From Bankruptcy, a Buy?
- Sanofi-Aventis Falling Off a Patent Cliff?
- Cramer: Your Thanksgiving Week Game Plan
- Your First Move For Monday November 23rd
- Burned By JPMorgan, Whirlpool & More
- The Latest Picks That Paid - Friday November 20th
- Web Extra: Defense, Defense
Managing Editor, CNBC.com
Swine flu or H1N1 ... what's your call?
We're having lots of debates about it in-house and with our companion news outlets.
You see the pork industry, for obvious reasons, would prefer the media to use the more scientific term. Can't blame it, really. Bacon isn't going to give you the flu, but with all the pig imagery associated with the epidemic coverage ... well, it can't be good for sales.
On the other hand, "swine flu" tends to be a more reader/viewer friendly term. Writers and reporters are constantly prodded to avoid alphabet-soup, jargony terminology. Also, some journos tend to get their hackles up when pushed by industry or government to adopt a certain phraseology. It's that "fight the spin" instinct that, frankly, can go a little far.
The journalistic fall back of Do What's Accurate isn't a whole lot of help here either. H1N1 actually refers to strains that have appeared in previous years. If we want to be full blown accurate, it'd be "2009 H1N1" or "Novel H1N1" -- even more of a mouthful. "Swine flu" seems to be the accepted name for what's going on now. And this strain of flu, while it has human and avian elements, is about half-swine based.
We're probably going to go with a switch-hitting approach ... use whichever term is more appropriate for the context. Scientific discussions should lend themselves to H1N1. General reporting on public fear will be more about "swine flu." But our debate is ongoing.







