The epidemic has so far killed at least 4,800 people in West Africa. There is no reason to believe Ebola will or could exact analogous tolls here, because, despite ooga-booga stories about Africans carrying tainted “bushmeat” in their luggage (Newsweek, 8/21/14; FAIR Blog, 8/28/14), the forces behind the viral outbreak largely have to do with infrastructure deficits and lack of access to healthcare.
But sober and data-driven isn’t exactly US media’s style, particularly when dealing with a disease associated with There that is seen to be coming Here. The concoction of ignorance and breathlessness has generated some truly terrible coverage.
“Fears of the other” have attended perceptions of disease “ever since the germ theory first associated microbes with illness,” Washington told FAIR’s CounterSpin (10/24/14), citing “Typhoid Mary,” an Irish woman when they were a “despised minority,” along with accusations that Chinese people were spreading plague in 1900s San Francisco and charges that Jews fomented disease in Polish ghettos.
No one suggests that journalists should know more than medical professionals about a disease that is largely unfamiliar to most people, or strive to speak definitively about evolving events.
It is fair to insist that they delineate what they know from what they don’t, and resist speculation and rumor-mongering. Not just because these have no place in responsible public health reporting, but because misinformation has effects.
In this case, these include both the fanning of violent xenophobia —as we’ve already seen in the case of, for example, Senegalese-American boys in the Bronx being beaten up while their attackers shouted “Ebola!” (Gothamist, 10/27/14)—and the individual and societal problems resulting from a misunderstanding of relative risk.
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