From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week's coverage of swine flu, or as we've been instructed to call it now, the H1N1 virus, was pretty scary, especially on cable.

And this oft-played soundbite from World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan certainly didn't help.

It really is all of humanity that is under threat.

Here's how CNN's Rick Sanchez responded to that.

It really doesn't get more serious than that, now, does it?

If you inhabit Earth, you are in danger of being infected.

Some newspapers tried to put the stage five imminent pandemic in perspective.

A headline from Thursday's LA Times read, scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild.

But according to NYU sociologist Eric Kleinenberg, reporters simply can't resist

a panic story. Kleinenberg has written about past disasters, most notably in his 2002 book,

Heat Wave, a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago. He's been getting calls from reporters

this week asking him to talk about the widespread

panic in response to H1N1. The only problem, there is no widespread panic. Tell that to the ABCNews.com

reporter who contacted him. The email said that they're looking for someone who could talk about the

way the public reacts in panics.

And then she goes on, think fallout shelters, anthrax scares, and buying duct tape before the Iraq war.

She just wants someone quotable who can give me a behavioral perspective on all of this.

So what's wrong with that?

Well, the problem is, if there's one finding that's consistent in the sociology of disasters over the last, say,

...