One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What's Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola

[KamaAina]

http://mic.com/articles/100618/one-powerful-illustration-shows-exactly-what-s-wrong-with-media-coverage-of-ebola

The Ebola epidemic has killed 3,431 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; it has killed one in the United States. Liberia's Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told the U.N. Security Council in September that the disease poses a "serious threat" to the country's existence; the Obama administration recently reminded everybody that "[America's] structure would preclude an outbreak." Health care workers are threatening to strike over dissatisfaction with wages; the U.S. sent 3,000 military personnel directly into the area to help combat the epidemic.

The Ebola headlines in Western media outlets, however, don't tell that story. The Western media circus has lapped up the Ebola epidemic and paraded it around as its newest act. It's everywhere you look — stories about "necessary" precautions, tales of children and even police cars under quarantine, fear that the disease has spread to other parts of the country. And it all has one singular focus: America and the West.

André Carrilho, an illustrator and cartoonist based in Lisbon whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and New York magazine, chose to play up this disparity in an August illustration, drawn shortly after two white missionaries stricken with Ebola were admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

"People tend to respond more to illustrations that have a point of view on issues that relate to their lives and their opinions," he told Mic in an email.

Indeed.