Michael Shanahan is the School of Media and Public Affairs’ assistant director for student affairs and an assistant professor of journalism.
Last week, in a parody of Ebola news coverage, Jon Stewart aired clips of hysterical TV stories that all suggested large numbers of Americans were threatened with the deadly disease.
“We can’t rely on the news media to take a reasoned approach,” the political comedian said, going on to ridicule politicians who had called for a ban on air travel to the United States from Liberia and other affected West African nations.
While much of the coverage of this epidemic has been accurate and restrained, many of the stories have done more to frighten than enlighten.
On Fox News, commentator Andrea Tantaros said people coming from West Africa with Ebola symptoms might choose not to seek treatment at an American hospital.
“They don’t believe in traditional medical care,” Tantaros said in a comment sure to be interpreted as racist. “Some could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor.”
Unfortunately, the Ebola story didn’t gain nearly as much national attention until a handful of American medical providers were infected with the virus. Not until a Liberian man was diagnosed with and treated for Ebola in a Dallas hospital did the frenzy of headlines begin. Then one nurse was infected, and another with the disease was permitted to fly from Dallas to Cleveland, which kept the coverage constant.
That created an echo chamber for politicians, especially those running for election next month, who demanded that West Africans be prohibited from flying to the United States. Every cable news channel has put Republican critics of President Barack Obama on the air, despite overwhelming evidence that such a policy would be counterproductive.
Additionally, many Republicans have condemned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and claimed that the Ebola cases in the U.S. prove the Obama administration is incapable of running the government.
So is all of this coverage scaring Americans to death? Not really. Instead, they seem to be absorbing the overheated coverage and waiting to see how the government handles the country’s relatively small number of cases.
A Pew Research Center poll found that well over half – 58 percent – of those questioned had confidence in the government’s ability to prevent a major outbreak of Ebola, while 30 percent said they weren’t afraid at all.
Overall, the fear level is well below what Americans felt during the Bird Flu epidemic, according to the Pew Center poll. And while many Americans seem to know little about how Ebola is transmitted (only through contact with bodily fluids), at least they are not panicking over frenzied news coverage, which would have them running for the hills.
