As the week comes to a close, anyone who works in the pork industry likely feels a bit run down, and it has nothing to do with contracting an actual viral infection, but it has everything to do with H1N1 influenza and its unfolding story.
For an agricultural industry that has often been on the leading edge of new developments, technology and change, the pork industry can add another one to its portfolio. It has now been thrown into the limelight as a new media guinea pig. By that I mean, it’s the first industry, certainly agricultural or food industry, to face the influence and fallout from today’s new media and the public’s instant-messaging obsessions and short attention spans. The “old media” outlets are not immune to some finger-pointing as television, radio, newspapers quickly labeled the new influenza virus and
outbreak as “swine flu,” which then spread like wildfire. The 24/7-news-media cycle in which we all live with today requires cable news and others to constantly fill the air waves, and that means talking and talking and talking about everything and anything you can think of related to a particular topic. However, its the “new media” of bloggers, text messages and Twitter where the inaccuracies, rumor and misinformation flourished and trumped patience, clarity and facts. Anti-animal agriculture groups even took advantage of the situation and used the new media vehicles to
campaign deeper and harder against modern agriculture that they so lovely like to label “factory farms.”