Don't panic, we are told. There is no imminent danger to humans. Well, if that is the case, why all the fuss, why the acres of coverage?

George Bernard Shaw once observed that journalists were people who could not tell the difference between the end of the world and a bicycle accident. I have always taken this less as a rebuke than as an acknowledgement of the peculiar imperatives of the trade. A journalist himself, Shaw no doubt understood that the front page must be filled no matter what, so if there is no better story around, you splash with the bike accident, and try to look like you mean it. It couldn't be any other way.

But I now wonder whether I have been misreading the man. Shaw probably never envisaged newspapers actually bringing news of the end of the world, but with the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are surely coming close to that, and the front pages have been instructive.

The story led the Times, the Guardian and the Independent all right, but elsewhere it somehow didn't make the grade. The Telegraph preferred "Blair revolt gathers pace", the Mail went for "Blairs buy home number five" and the Express announced: "Thousands say: Scrap death tax". As for the red tops, the end of the world simply could not compete with Kylie's love split - a celebrity bicycle accident, you might say.

I know, I know: for all its importance, the IPCC report was hardly a surprise, and so in that sense it might legitimately be considered page-two material, though I still think that our benighted grandchildren, when they are not cursing us for wrecking their planet, will mock us for our daft news values.

Then came bird flu, and I began to wonder even more about Shaw. How big a story was the outbreak in Suffolk - end of the world or bicycle accident? The papers themselves seemed confused.

The red tops, bless 'em, were still in Kylie-land, railing against the love-rat Olivier Martinez, but elsewhere everyone treated the outbreak as big news, with the full array of on-the-spot coverage, sidebars, graphics and Q&A panels; it rated pages one, two and three of the Financial Times, no less. Yet no one could say why.

A Guardian leader gives a flavour of the problem: "The balance between risk and uncertainty is not easy to judge in a situation where known dangers can be transformed by biological change." (Donald Rumsfeld, it seems, is alive and well.) At worst, the leader went on, the threat is very great, and it described the catastrophic effect a flu pandemic would have among human beings in Britain. Then again, it admitted, "as things stand, the risk to humans is low".

So low, in fact, that the UN's top man on bird flu, David Nabarro, told the FT the risk of a crossover to humans as a result of the Suffolk outbreak was "infinitesimally small". So low that, as Mick Hume wrote in the Times, the government chief scientist puts your chance of catching it at 100 million to one. So low, you might say, that bicycle accidents seem a pressing concern by comparison.

It would be wrong, however, to accuse the papers of alarmism, of setting out to frighten us needlessly, for that is something they were extremely careful to avoid. None of the customary dissenters and contrarians has been given space to challenge the official line (though some of those climate-change deniers must have time on their hands). Yet nowhere in print could you find anyone urging people to give up eating turkey or avoid Suffolk or stockpile medicines; nor could you find anything but responsible, low-key presentations of that worst-case scenario, a pandemic similar to the Spanish flu of 1918.

Don't panic, was the message: there is no imminent danger. The Sun even passed up the chance to describe the nastier symptoms of H5N1 in humans - which apparently include a swollen head - blandly declaring instead that it was like ordinary flu, but worse.

So, if this has not been a matter of imminent danger, why all the fuss, why the acres of coverage? It can't be about the fate of the 159,000 turkeys that met their deaths four weeks before they would otherwise have done.

Nor were we seriously concerned for Bernard Matthews, whose name may remain a well-known brand but who long ago ceased to be a popular, familiar personality. It must be nearly 25 years since he did those television adverts, and few of us would now recognise him in the street - the many references to "bootiful" in the papers were probably lost on most people under 35.

Nor can it really be about the poultry industry and those who work in it. Yes, the risks to them, economically and otherwise, are far higher than for the rest of us, and yes, some people must be worried and deserve our sympathy, but it would take a lot to convince me that these concerns have been driving the coverage.

So many words, so many pictures, so much newsprint, and yet, on the evidence, it is nothing like the end of the world. Perhaps Shaw could explain it.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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