The headline: "No new swine flu cases in update."
Musings: the BBC is showing a sudden awareness of the likelihood of being parodied if it had gone with the obvious temptation - "No new swine flu cases in Scotland." Instead, it has found the magic formula which makes this news: it's not the lack of new swine flu victims which is news, but the fact that somebody has reported that there are no new cases.
Even worse than this apparent discovery of a justification for non-news" (It's not "not news", it's "no-news news") is the additional rationale: that the swine flu story has become so huge that it probably is newsworthy to report that it's not happening. The default view is no longer that nothing newsworthy is happening until we are told otherwise, it's that anything which runs counter to the public expectation created by the news is itself newsworthy.
Of course, the BBC must faithfully report news without passing judgement on whether or not it ought to be newsworthy. Which neatly sidesteps questions about the role of the BBC - and, of course, all the other media outlets - in inflating this particular story in the first place, and creating that public expectation which it now falls to them to moderate.
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