“EBOLA VIRUS OUTBREAK” screams the banner on NBC’s website in yellow block letters. The other half of the screen is taken up with a looping blue Ebola virus on a blood red background. Once you scroll down you can actually read the headline, which wonders “Why are Americans so scared of Ebola?” with such a breath-taking lack of irony that it seems almost intentional.
Many news sources are even less aware. CNN headlines and articles read like blurbs on the back of B-movie zombie flicks. The Daily Mirror asserts that “80% of US nurses don’t know their hospital’s Ebola policy”, with a statistic that they have seemingly pulled out of thin air. Scroll down a little further and “touching your face could be a death sentence”. In the rather plaintive aforementioned NBC article they have their own stats – this time that 40% of Americans believe that there will be a “large outbreak” of Ebola in the US.
There’s nothing the media likes more than a good epidemic, but the politics of Ebola coverage are more complex than a simple fear of disease. There are several layers of issues that need to be addressed in this situation. The NBC feed had 506 (and counting) articles on the Ebola epidemic at the time this article was written, and while some of them are more objective informative pieces, a large number are highly sensationalist, including interview, testimonies, and articles on victims’ families and neighbours. What is more, while there has only definitely been two cases of infection in Europe and the US, and over 4,000 deaths in West Africa, you would be hard pressed to find the name or even the individual mention of any Ebola victim who wasn’t directly linked to the West in some way. Social media polls have shown that people only properly began talking about it once the disease physically reached the US.
The results of polls that show that public hysteria is significantly more rampant than in comparable bird or swine flu epidemics, combined with fundamental geopolitical facts about how we see the world, indicates that there is more at play.
Ebola hysteria hit the US – and the twitterverse – with the arrival of two white, American, missionaries in Atlanta who were infected with the virus. However, the reaction online, as tracked by Google search data, was nothing compared to what happened when Thomas Duncan arrived in Dallas before succumbing to Ebola as well. Online interest spikes to almost double the height the Atlanta case triggered. News outlets, members of congress, and personalities like Donald Trump expressed the view that migrants should be denied entry to the US, even though Duncan was travelling with a visa, and suggested that the reason the epidemic was so widespread was a reliance on so-called “witch doctors”. There were accusations that he had already known he was infected, and travelled for American healthcare. The missionaries were portrayed as victims, Duncan as no more than a rat spreading a plague.
People talk about the media desensitizing us, and with regards to an entire continent and over one billion people, it seems to have done so almost entirely. The frequently fear-mongering media coverage of any epidemic is often questionable, but rarely do we get to see so starkly the “othering” that occurs when the location is outside the West.
[Nate Macia i Carter]
qmunicatemagazine.co.uk 