Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), not helping.
A typical election season in America:
In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died, the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation, political opportunism and garden-variety panic.
Lots and lots of panic, as it turns out.
A crowd of parents last week pulled their children out of a Mississippi middle school after learning that its principal had traveled to Zambia, an African nation untouched by the disease. […]
Carolyn Smith of Louisville, Ky., last week took a rare break from sequestering herself at home to take her fiancé to a doctor’s appointment. She said she was reluctant to leave her house after hearing that a nurse from the Dallas hospital had flown to Cleveland, over 300 miles from her home. "We're not really going anywhere if we can help it," Ms. Smith, 50, said. […]
Also last week, a teacher at an elementary school in Strong, Me., was placed on a 21-day paid leave when parents told the school board that they were worried he had been exposed to Ebola during a trip to Dallas for an educational conference.
What's not found in this article from the
New York Times is any mention of why someone who lives over 300 miles away from a city where Ebola might have been is self-quarantining. Loving the convergence of a potential epidemic and a national election, the traditional media
has gone nuts with huge images of the Ebola virus and hazmat suits, with headlines screaming terror. Having a Republican party intent on maximizing the terror to mobilize their base has just fed that flame, giving the media the opportunity to keep the story front and center day-after-day. Like NBC on its website:
The kicker? That's at the top of the page for
this story: "Texas Ebola Watch Ends for Dozens of Contacts of Thomas Eric Duncan." That's right. All 43 people who were in contact with Mr. Duncan—the only person to die of Ebola in the U.S.—have passed the 21-day incubation period for the disease without getting ill. Even Louise Troh, Duncan’s fiancée, and the couple's son are healthy. But do we have the screaming headlines telling us about how not sick any of these people are? Of course not.
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Andrew Seaman, a medical journalist with Reuters and the ethics chair of the Society of Professional Journalists,
says: "Journalists shouldn’t pander to that fear or anxiety by including the most shocking or ominous images they find. The SPJ Code of Ethics applies to photography as it would to any other form of journalism. The images should reflect the truth—as should the other pieces of journalism it accompanies." Yes, they should.