ABSTRACT
The mass media fascination with mass death and mass disease has a long history, to be sure, but there is something more specific that needs to be said about the way in which viruses are going viral today. What makes a disease communicable in our culture of media? To address this question, we need to take into account what Doane has said about mass media more generally: such media incessantly take as [their] own subject matter the documentation and revalidation of their own discursive problematic. In this chapter, I argue that the mass media has found in the idea of the next pandemic an ideal opportunity to corroborate its own discursive problematic.
