Sweeping Up the Bird Poop

Jason Schwartz, who spends all day long thinking about vaccines now that basketball season is over, emailed to tell us about what has to be the most important movie of the year: 'Fatal Contact', a May sweeps broadcast (that means, for those of you who only listen to NPR and brag about it to your neighbors, a program aired during the month in which some kind of device is activated that measures for networks and advertisers how many morons would actually tune in to watch a made-for-TV bird flu movie) that is ready to go.

And at ABC they stay on top of the news when they make their "scare the hell out of everyone" TV movies:

"We had wonderful consultants who were actually ahead of the [bird-flu] curve," Kerew said. "The way the disease popped up in China, then moved to Turkey and Africa, were things we already knew about." "Our movie has a character who was in Iraq and got the bird flu there and survived - and, as we were shooting, the bird flu hit Iraq," Verno said.

And ultimately, isn't television supposed to serve the public?

"We feel we're providing a level of awareness and we've gone to great effort to make sure the film is accurate," co-producer Judith Verno said. "We've included a lot of information we believe people need to know."

What I want to know is which ads will run. Maybe we should run a public service announcement for the politics and bioethics conference?