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Pandemic

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Laura Ling goes to Vietnam, the frontline in the fight against bird flu, to see what the government and people are doing to ward off a possible pandemic.
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1 response // Pandemic

  • One of the things that we're trying to eliminate here in Vanguard is the angle. Not that we work in round offices, but in traditional TV news segments there is an "angle" to the story, such as: "Kentucky Derby Won By A Horse!" However, our feeling is that an angle is a slice of the whole, and if you take too narrow a slice out of the reality of our rapidly-changing world, the extraneous information that you exclude might be actually the stuff that fills in the picture of what's going on... For example, this is a story about how the government of Vietnam, thanks to the miracle of authoritarianism, was able to order all the poultry in its major cities killed to prevent the chance that a chicken sick with Avian Flu could pass it to a human being--hard to do because as the name implies it's a flu virus that mainly affects avians--thereby kicking off a world-wide human flu panedemic that potentially kills tens of millions, possibly including you or me. But although this seems like high stakes-stuff, you see that Laura takes the time to compliment the job that one woman does trimming the eyebrows of her friend, look at a squirming sack of giant frogs or toads, and so forth. It's not that she has ADD. And it's not simply that doing so makes people like and trust her so they talk to her--kind of important in the journalism business if you're not simply going to go with a stand-up and "expert interview"--as discussed by me regarding the piece that Laura did called Cupping. It's also that this is the reality of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh cities, where the battle against avian flu was taking place. These are the people on the front lines, the ones who have to cooperate, or not, in the struggle, so you should have a look at them... Technically speaking, Laura here shows a near flawless ability to alternate from tracking the "serious" aspects of the story, with pausing to interact about other features of her environment, which allows her to diverge so far from an angle, while not losing the point.
    MitchKoss

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