Thus spoke anchor Shepard Smith … of FOX News no less.
His pleading was so warranted because, given the media coverage, one could be forgiven for fearing that Ebola has already become such a contagion, its devastation could rival that of the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people. Frankly, I can attest that one does not have to be sick from Ebola to be sick of Ebola….
And don’t get me started on all of the government’s feckless, panic-affirming measures, which include TSA agents screening incoming passengers for high fever, the CDC forming Ebola SWAT teams, and congressmen calling for a ban on travel from West Africa. For these make about as much sense, in the circumstances, as police swarming subway stations and area airports – looking like invading U.S. Marines – whenever al-Qaeda issues a vague threat about striking New York City again.
Incidentally, am I the only one who wonders why we never hear about terrorists threatening to strike a city like South Bend (Indiana), Columbus (Ohio), or Tallahassee (Florida)…? After all, chances are very good that, with so much of America’s anti-terror efforts focused on New York City and Washington DC, terrorists could easily kill more people by targeting one college football game in one of those cities than they killed on 9/11. But I digress….
Here in part is the solitary note of reason I sounded weeks ago, when I finally felt compelled to do my part to counter this Ebola scaremongering:
Despite panic-inducing media reports, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 10 times as many people die in the United States from the flu each year than the number of those who have died from Ebola in all of Africa.
(“Ebola,” The iPINIONS Journal, September 26, 2014)
Imagine how heartened I was, therefore, when I read about Shepard Smith of FOX News upbraiding his media colleagues on Wednesday as follows:
Do not listen to the hysterical voices on the radio and the television or read the fear-provoking words online… We do not have an outbreak of Ebola in the United States: nowhere…
Get a flu shot: unlike Ebola, flu is easily transmitted; flu, along with resulting pneumonia, killed 52,000 Americans last year alone.
(Huffington Post, October 16, 2014)
In fact, no less a person than Dr. Isabelle Nuttall – director of the World Health Organization’s global capacities, alert, and response – took pains during a briefing yesterday to distinguish between a Ebola arriving in a country (as it has in the United States) and Ebola spreading throughout a country (as it has in Liberia).
Moreover, no reasonable person listening to her briefing could fail to appreciate that more people will die in the United States from gun violence today, than the number who might die from Ebola over the next three months – the amount of time WHO experts believe it will take to stem its spread in West Africa, where the latest death toll is 4,500.
This is why Smith was so right to decry America’s hysterical reaction by reminding folks that all we have are two infected healthcare workers in Texas – who, because they failed to follow proper protocol, contracted the disease while treating a dying man (Eric Duncan) – who himself contracted it in Liberia before flying to the United States.
Unfortunately, only the next big scare will stop major networks like CNN from continuing their Chicken-Little coverage. And nothing is more disingenuous in this respect than the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams spending the first nine minutes of its broadcast last night scaremongering about Ebola, and the next minute emulating Shepard’s cautionary reporting about Ebola hysteria.
What’s more, I suspect TV viewers all over the country are finding that their local news stations are fully engaged in monkey-see-monkey-do reporting on Ebola. Because, no matter how plainly unsustainable, they all generate spikes in ratings these days by presenting everything as “Breaking [Bad] News.”
But, really, the only thing more ridiculous and irresponsible than having reporters all over TV inciting panic about Ebola is having financial analysts all over TV blaming the roller-coaster ride on Wall Street on news reports about Ebola.
Yet, most disheartening of all is the way President Obama gave credence to all of this media scaremongering by cancelling all scheduled engagements on Wednesday and convening an emergency meeting at the White House – to devise a national strategy to combat an Ebola outbreak that does not, and very likely never will, exist.
Not to mention that, in so doing, he practically ensured that the media will not be reporting, among other things:
- that, despite un-American and un-Christian Republican efforts to undermine it, Obamacare has performed far beyond even Obama’s great expectations in its first year, which ended on September 30;
- that unemployment is at a six-year low (with jobless claims at a 14-year low), and the budget deficit Republicans scaremongers claimed Obama’s economic policies would balloon above $1 trillion has in fact shrank to the lowest level since 2007 at $483 billion for fiscal 2014;
- that Obama has done such a terrific job of putting the squeeze on Putin (for annexing Crimea and stirring unrest in Eastern Ukraine) that the price of the oil Putin relies on to fund his mischief has fallen by almost 20 percent. (This is particularly newsworthy because Putin has been reduced to making the kinds of hollow threats about launching nuclear war to get attention on the world stage, which we’ve come to expect only from the boy president of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.);
- that the Kurds, with air cover from U.S. and other coalition bombers, are forcing Daesh (aka ISIS) to retreat in Iraq. (This is particularly newsworthy because these are the same Daesh terrorists/bogeymen who the media were covering just weeks ago as an even greater threat to the United States than the contagion they would have us believe Ebola is today.); and, perhaps most important,
- that you are far more likely to get struck by lightning … twice than you are to contract Ebola, which requires direct contact with the bodily fluids of a person who is not just infected but already showing symptoms of the disease.
Of course, there’s nothing scary about any of these “October surprises;” therefore, they do not qualify as news that’s fit to cover by the media, which thrive these days on scaremongering.
Finally, I know of no expert on the spreading of infectious diseases who has advocated imposing the ban on travel from West Africa referenced above. In fact, they all say that such a ban would likely incite panic travel and thereby exacerbate the spread of Ebola.
Therefore, politicians insisting on a travel ban, in defiance of what science dictates are the best practices for combating Ebola, are no different from those insisting on a rollback of environmental regulations, in defiance of what science dictates are the best practices for combating climate change. And the shame in this context is all the more dismaying given that Obama’s former press secretary, Jay Carney, is leading the peanut gallery of those calling for this ban.
This is why I commend Obama for refusing, thus far, to extend his shameless pandering on Ebola to siding with these flat-earth politicians – who clearly have no compunctions whatsoever about scapegoating West Africans just to provide their ignorant constituents a false sense of security.
NOTE: Since December 2013, an Ebola-like virus called chikunguya has been spreading throughout the East Caribbean the way Ebola has been throughout West Africa. It is reportedly not nearly as deadly as Ebola. Yet the Pan American Health Organization has documented 113 deaths related to chikungunya.
My people down in the Caribbean are hardly begging for the kind of attention or aid Ebola has spooked the international community into directing towards West Africa. But I hope they can be forgiven a little indignation – not only at the hysteria Ebola is causing in the United States, but also because U.S. officials seem so utterly unconcerned about chikungunya coming here too.
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