Peter Rhodes on a viral scam, an incendiary pig and how the media are always looking the wrong way

Until this week I assumed, like most hacks, that the ultimate grab-a-reader headline was the one famously dreamed up by a Times sub-editor many years ago: “Sex-change vicar in mercy dash to Palace.” But now comes stiff competition from the BBC News website.

It began on a farm near Leeds where the pigs wear pedometers (seriously) to prove their free-range credentials when they go to market. One of the pigs ate one of the pedometers. The batteries in the device passed through the creature and then reacted with the pigs' excrement and dry bedding, causing a small fire. This gave Auntie Beeb the headline: “Pedometer-eating pig's poo starts farm blaze.” What a great line. We shall not see its like again.

This coronavirus outbreak involves a classic case of the media looking the wrong way. As we usually do. It is a tradition dating back to the Pompeii Bugle (city final edition) which one evening in AD79 reported that the most serious threat to the future of Pompeii was the rising price of prostitutes, and that smell of sulphur was probably just the drains. Likewise, in April 1912, as RMS Titanic set sail, editors everywhere cheerfully repeated the PR bumf (It's made of iron, how could it possibly sink?). And in the summer of 1914 nobody paid much attention to some Austrian archduke getting shot in Sarajevo, because how could that affect anything?

We were looking the wrong way again six weeks ago when the media were united in the belief that the big story of 2020 would be the fall-out from Brexit. We were so focused on the EU that no-one paid much attention to whispers of some sudden deaths in a far-off city. Trouble in Wuhan? Surely you mean Brussels . . ?

A reader alerts me to a particularly wicked internet scam. It begins with an email telling you you've been in direct contact with a carrier of coronavirus. To get further instructions you must click on to a link. This is a phishing scam, designed to get your personal details and empty your bank account by scaring the bejabbers out of you. Just bin it.

Part of me longs for this crisis to get serious enough for the Government to skip limp-wristed “emergency measures” and go straight to martial law. This would enable the authorities not only to track down the internet scammers but take them into a cell and break out the birches. You probably think I'm joking.

According to some reports, if the disease spreads, the over-70s may be advised to stay in their homes and not have many visitors. So no change there, then.

Those of you reading this on old-fashioned newspapers have a distinct advantage over folk following it online. If your local supermarket shelves are stripped of toilet paper, I hope you find this column not only absorbing but, if need be, absorbent.