In Mississippi, parents pulled their children out of school after learning their principal had traveled to a part of Africa thousands of miles away from the Ebola outbreak. In New Jersey and Georgia, students from areas in Africa completely unscathed by the disease weren’t allowed to come to school. In Texas, a community college rejected two Nigerian applicants, because it refused to admit any students from countries affected by Ebola, presumably not realizing that that list included America. A rampant fear of the disease is spreading across the country, with two-thirds of Americans expressing worry about a large-scale domestic Ebola outbreak.
Politicians don’t seem to be any more levelheaded than the public. Senators from Ted Cruz (R-TX) to Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) have voiced support for a ban on travel from the countries in West Africa affected by Ebola, despite CDC director Tom Frieden’s insistence that a travel ban would make it harder to track people coming into the U.S. from these areas. Governors in states from Florida to New York have imposed mandatory quarantines on health workers arriving from the region, despite many experts’ argument that it would only serve to stigmatize these workers and discourage people from going to afflicted regions to help.
Ebola hysteria, it seems, has had much more of an impact on the country than the disease itself. Thusfar, there have been ten people treated in the U.S. for Ebola, and while two of them have died, the other eight are now Ebola-free. According to data compiled by NPR, the risk of contracting the disease in America is 1 in 13.3 million, less than the risk of being killed in an airplane crash, from a lightning strike, from a bee sting, or by a shark. In many ways, the media is to blame for public’s overreaction. Robert Fullilove, the associate dean of community and minority health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, told the HPR in an interview, “I think just the fact that we’re seeing daily coverage of an epidemic that, in the United States, has thusfar affected nine people, is a way of describing how, at least at this point, … the coverage is a little bit out of proportion to the nature of the threat that we in this nation actually face.”
‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’
So why has something that has claimed fewer lives in America than bee stings received so much media coverage? Fullilove says one reason is that news outlets have a monetary incentive for coverage, especially sensational coverage, in terms of the viewers and readers it draws. “It’s something that attracts a wide readership, a lot of viewers. I think it’s difficult for anybody in the media not to want to have something that provides them with viewership and readership and I think this is just too good for them to pass up.”
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus made a similar argument in an October column, writing, “There are no viewers for the plane that doesn’t fall from the sky. The adage, ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ is terrifyingly apt when it comes to hemorrhagic fever. So we swarm to Dallas, interview neighbors, tweet breaking-news bulletins.” In an interview with the HPR, Karen Dill-Shackleford, director of the media psychology program at Fielding Graduate University, argued that cable news outlets have been particularly bad about spreading misinformation about Ebola. “They know that these things are not true in the way that they present them, but they’re just trying to drum up interest, and unfortunately they just usually push the simple button which is fear.”
These cable news outlets have given conspiracy theorists and fear mongers free range to spread the hysteria. CNN host Don Lemon presented fiction writer Robin Cook as an authority on the disease, and Fox News gave Missouri doctor Gil Mobley, who had walked through Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson International Airport wearing a hazmat suit with the words “CDC is lying” painted on the back, almost nine minutes of airtime to proclaim that “people need to be scared.” An October 6 CNN segment even went so far as to compare Ebola to “the ISIS of biological agents.”
Cristine Russell, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the former president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, sees this baseless fear-mongering as deeply problematic. In an interview with the HPR, she said, “Live cable television has definitely been the worst coverage, and mixing fear with facts, and a lot of concern and anxiety-raising coverage.” Dill-Shackleford echoed Russell’s sentiment, telling the HPR that Fox News has been particularly guilty of spreading false ideas about Ebola. “They were doing what I would more call fear mongering or exaggerating the facts, the idea that you can catch Ebola or maybe it will become airborne.”
Dill-Shackleford also said that Stephen Colbert’s parody of Fox News emphasizes the problems with their coverage of Ebola. In an October segment entitled “Deathpocalypse Now: Ebola in America: 50 States of Grave,” Colbert airs a clip of the Fox News program Fox & Friends in which the hosts call into question whether the CDC and other authorities are telling the American public the truth. Colbert mockingly agrees, proclaiming “I won’t be fooled into staying calm by the so-called experts with their so-called medical degrees.” Dill-Shackleford argued, “You can’t underestimate what a great job Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and now John Oliver, those kind of political satirists, do, because they specifically show that coverage from Fox and point out what’s wrong with it and laugh at it.”
Republicans vs. Democrats
Media coverage of Ebola has been further skewed by the increased politicization of the issue. With the emergence of Ebola in America coinciding with the midterm elections, politicians from both parties attempted to craft narratives about the diseases that benefitted them politically. Many Republican candidates attempted to paint Ebola as another example of the failure of President Obama. Bill Cassidy, the Republican nominee for Senate in Louisiana, said President Obama’s handling of Ebola was “posing an immediate danger” to the state. Other Republicans used public fears about Ebola to advance political priorities unrelated to Ebola. In a July letter to the CDC, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) falsely claimed that illegal immigrants were bringing Ebola across the Mexican border into the U.S., and called for a longtime Republican goal, increased border security.
Democrats, however, have also used questionable claims about Ebola for political gain. In October, a Democratic group called the Agenda Project released an ad linking Republicans to drastic budget cuts that decreased the CDC’s ability to respond to Ebola, proclaiming “Republican cuts kill.”
Russell told the HPR, “When it shifted from a public health story to a more conventional political story, then we have the underlying political objectives kind of coloring the actual story about what is the right thing to do from a public health standpoint.” These political objectives resulted in calls for mandatory quarantines for healthcare workers and a travel ban from West Africa, policies that resonated with the public, but are counterproductive in terms of their impact on public health.
Dill-Shackleford also sees a cultural reason for the ease with which a station like Fox News can turn a serious issue like Ebola into finger-pointing: “People psychologically really like to have something to blame for things that bother them, and if [Fox News] creates something to bother them like Ebola … they make what is essentially nothing in terms of a personal threat into a threatening situation and then a situation where they can blame President Obama and his administration for putting them at risk.”
Fear of the ‘Other’
Many argue that there is also a distinct undertone of xenophobia in the media’s coverage of Ebola. Fullilove told the HPR, “I believe that it is a quintessentially human tendency to divide the world into two convenient categories: us and them. The us, family, friends, people around us, the familiar. Them, anybody who’s not familiar.” Thus, Fullilove argues, when a disease comes to America from an area like West Africa that is relatively unknown to Americans, it is easy for us to see it as more dangerous than it is. “Because they don’t speak our language, because they don’t have anything that we can identify with as familiar, they become the easy objects of our worst fears and fantasies.”
Dennis Andrulis, a senior research scientist at the Texas Health Institute, says that this separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ plays an essential role in how we view those infected with Ebola in Africa. “By doing that, what you do is you almost dehumanize them, remove them into some other category, where it makes it more palatable somehow to keep them out to protect us.” In an essay for the Poynter Institute, Roy Peter Clark expands on this idea, discussing the idea of Africa as the “Dark Continent,” a place of “primitive and pervasive dangers, where wild animals abound and dark-skinned humans engage in barbaric practices such as cannibalism.” Clark writes, “I do not believe the irrational public fear of Ebola would be nearly as great if the disease had not come ‘out of Africa.’”
Andrulis draws a parallel between the reaction to Ebola and the reaction to the September 11th terrorist attacks. After 9/11, even though the vast majority were appalled by what happened, Arab Muslims in America were seen as ‘them,’ rather than ‘us.’ Andrulis explained: “They’re exotic, they’re different, they don’t practice the way we do, and so it’s easier to start putting limitations on them, to cast a suspicious eye, to move away from them, to not be around them.”
Others compare our reaction to Ebola with that to AIDS in the 1980s. In an essay published by Salon, Amanda Marcotte wrote, “the ebola panic quite resembles the way many conservatives reacted in the early days of AIDS, demonizing sufferers as disgusting people who should be isolated and left to die.” Richard Besser expanded on this analogy in an op-ed in The Washington Post, writing that during the AIDS epidemic, “infected children were barred from schools and some health professionals wouldn’t provide care.”
This xenophobia took a more concrete form in the media’s coverage of Ebola in early October, when Fox News pundit Andrea Tantaros remarked that, in West Africa, “they don’t believe in traditional medical care. So someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor.” And just two weeks later, another Fox News expert, Keith Albow, said on a show that President Obama’s “affinities, his affiliations” are with Africa and “not us … He’s their leader.”
#Ebola
Further compounding traditional media’s coverage of Ebola is the rise of social media, where news travels faster and veracity is harder to determine. Tweets from seemingly authoritative figures can cause major ripples in the Twittersphere. Donald Trump called for an ill-advised travel ban, tweeting “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Chris Brown proclaimed to his 13 million followers his conviction that “this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.” And the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party made a splash when he proposed on Twitter that “The protocol for a positive Ebola test should be immediate humane execution and sanitization of the whole area.”
Russell is concerned that too many people, usually the ones most frightened of Ebola, are getting their information from social media. “[On] Facebook and Twitter, it’s just rampant misinformation, haranguing, scary stuff.” Russell does, however, see a silver lining in the hysteria about Ebola provoked by mainstream media outlets and social media: “I guess one good outcome of this giant increase in Ebola coverage has been that a story that was already a crisis but was not getting a lot of attention in the U.S. is now getting a lot of attention.”
Fullilove thinks the media narrative about Ebola needs to shift back to the true problem: the public health crisis in West Africa and how to address it. “We’re playing up the degree to which we’re threatened, and not playing up the degree to which, as the greatest, most powerful nation in the world, we have a responsibility to do what we can to contain this epidemic before more people are killed.” In a rare moment of levelheadedness for cable news, Fox News host Shepard Smith accused many media outlets’ coverage of Ebola of being “hysterical” and “irresponsible.” Whether these outlets will follow Smith’s lead is yet to be seen.