ABC led the news Tuesday night with a tuberculosis scare. Tuberculosis!?  The last time I can remember anyone making a fuss about tuberculosis was in Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, which is set in a sanitarium. Perhaps Tuesday was just a slow news day?  In any event, if we’d known in advance that TB would top the headlines on a given night, we might have laid in an emergency supply of bottled water and canned food. 

The TB scare involved a man infected with an evidently incurable strain of the disease who flew from the U.S. to Europe and back a few weeks ago.  Perhaps ABC should have emphasized the dog-bites-man aspect of the story – that we can all breathe easier knowing there were more than three hundred million Americans who were not on that flight. But to lead with the story?

Sometimes the toughest choice an editor can make is when there is no news – other than the kind that doesn’t belong on the front page.  I faced such a dilemma myself once when I worked as a news editor for a daily paper in New Jersey.  The editors met at dinner time each night to discuss the placement of stories in the next morning’s edition. On one particular occasion, the only local news item we had was a gruesome story off the police blotter involving the fatal mauling of a small child by a household Sheepdog (aka "Nana"). The choice was made more difficult by the fact that the dog was not a pit bull, nor was the neighborhood a “bad” one. In fact, the accident occurred in one of the toniest resorts in Southern New Jersey, and the way it happened could have occurred in any household with a large dog.

Forbearance carried the day, and the newspaper held back the story until the coroner’s report was in.  He said that it was the sort of tragedy that could happen to any family.  It never made the news.  Now, although it’s too late to recall the tuberculosis scare, we can still hope that it turns out the story was egregiously overplayed.