On Ebola and the Media Panic Industry

[Playinghardball]

By Liberal Librarian

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few weeks—and if you have, you may want to skip this and stay there where it’s safe—you may have noticed the media has a shiny new toy.

The Ebola outbreak which has reached our shores—infecting less than ten people—has our failed media experiment in a veritable apoplexy. CNN, looking for something to replace it’s 24/7 coverage of MH370 and recapture those golden days of summer, has joined MSNBC and Fox in providing a constant stream of information on the breakout. And by “constant stream of information”, I mean dialing the panic button up to 12 and reporting as if half of the country has been infected with the virus. Rather than a contained outbreak, this Ebola infestation is a new Black Death, scything through the population with grim glee.

Now, I know that it’s hard filling in the time between commercials. A news producer’s job is never easy. But there seems to be something disreputable about media organizations latching on to a very minor outbreak and building it up to be an existential threat to humanity. And, of course, the coverage was nowhere near as manic when the Ebola pandemic was restricted to west African nations. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are facing real catastrophic consequences to their economies and social fabric; but, they’re far away, and in Africa, so not worthy of foaming at the mouth coverage.

When something like Ebola hits, the real force multiplier is panic and ignorance. Many people in villages in affected African nations turn on the health workers, thinking they’re bringing the disease. But the media and governments in those countries are trying to stanch the spread of fear, so that the disease can be contained. Here in the US, however, the media, rather than providing calm reasoned information, is doing the opposite, entertaining every wild theory, covering our minor outbreak as if the Apocalypse is nigh, and stoking the very fear and panic which can turn a minor infection into the cataclysm they claim they’re trying to avoid. Is it air transmissible? Should you invest in a hazmat suit? Should you hole up in your basement with canned beans and a stock of weapons? In other words, the media isn’t helping.

But the media hasn’t helped matters on anything of import for decades. Just before Ebola, it was the specter of ISIL cadres swimming across the Rio Grande to wreak havoc on American cities. The US media has settled into a routine of injecting a huge dose of panic into topics which require calmness and reason, because, again, they have to fill up those minutes between commercials somehow. Anyone who thinks that our news media’s first principle is to inform the public should have that notion knocked out of his head by its performance for the past two weeks. The media’s first mission is to deliver eyeballs to its advertisers.

However, it’s finding it increasingly difficult to do that. Ratings keep plummeting. Fox, the “number 1 rated news network”, has a peak viewership which would doom any network entertainment show.

Yet despite the low viewership, that’s not to say that cable news doesn’t have influence. Of course it does. And that influence is pernicious. It dumbs down every topic of complexity to an indigestible mush. The “liberal media” is a myth, like unicorns, or the check being in the mail. Cable news is there to deliver entertainment by other means. But what makes it especially destructive is that entertainment shouldn’t be anywhere in its brief. The press has a major role to play in any democracy. It’s a forum for debate, and a means of conveying analysis and comment. The media has jettisoned any such pretense, instead engaged in a quest for the next hot story which will fill in all that time.

And nothing sells more than panic. When panic grips, people watch. Not to be informed, but to have a sense of community in the panic. Atomized in our homes and cars, seeing a news organization feeding back our fears to us is somehow comforting. “See, we’re right to be scared. The news says so.” We’re like junkies; the news media wouldn’t act the way it does if there weren’t buyers.

As I always say at the end of one of my media critiques: turn off the television. None of the cable news outfits offer anything of substance. They’re metastasized gummy bears, sugar and calories and nothing more. The sooner they either reform or go the way of other failed technologies, the better it will be for our democracy.

http://theobamadiary.com/2014/10/16/on-ebola-and-the-media-panic-industry/

[uppityperson]

1. BIG K&R

[Tweedy]

2. Grrr!

Here we have a hospital which negligently failed to treat a patient or protect its workers. The media seems to have no notion of federalism and folks are calling for the firing of the head of the CDC. It is beyond ridiculous. Meanwhile, in Africa a real tragedy is unfolding.