Panic, Pandemic, and Ebola: Why you shouldn’t trust anything Fox News says about public health and safety.
In late 2013 and early 2014 I was the coordinator for a small multidisciplinary team planning a month-long trip to six West African countries to assess the impact of a variety of coastal mangrove forest conservation programs. The team was a Cameroonian botanist, a Bangladeshi development economist, and me (a marginally competent anthropologist and social scientist).
As I lined up our timetable and agenda for the weeks ahead, an alarming situation arose. A new strain of Ebola, the terrifying hemorrhagic disease ordinarily confined to less-accessible regions of Central Africa, was suddenly manifesting in the very region where my team was heading — far North of its usual territory .
This was my first time planning and coordinating an overseas data collection trip, and the idea that my planning decisions would have a direct bearing on the safety and health of my colleagues led me to agonize over the timing and viability of the trip. Fortunately, my employer had a number of public health workers active across that region. I was also working hand-in-hand with USAID on the project, giving me access to a broad pool of well-placed experts and specialists directly connected to the work on the ground. Additionally, I had the benefit of some fundamental training in the basics of epidemiology and public health, thanks to the efforts of a handful of top-notch biological anthropologists in both my undergrad and graduate school.
Based on everything we knew about the location and extent of the outbreak, we decided to move ahead with our fieldwork.
We hit the ground running in March 2014, and everyone on the team was home before the end of April. Three months later the epidemic exploded.
It was the worst Ebola outbreak on record, killing more than 11,000 people region-wide.
We all got home safely (give or take a waterborne parasite or two), and the focus of my work shifted to East Africa, but I couldn’t stop tracking the Ebola epidemic. Once I get to know a field, I can’t just put it down.
And what I saw was horrifying. Not just there in West Africa, but here in the US as well. A global news organization was deliberately misrepresenting the circumstances and facts around the disease to millions of people. Fox News was quite literally lying to their entire audience about how the epidemic was being handled in order to make President Obama look dangerous and incompetent.
The Obama administration (and even more so the WHO and MSF) handled the Ebola outbreak with intense quiet professionalism. Leadership and decision-making were handed over to the experts almost immediately, and their guidance was followed closely. Despite general concern across many media channels (including the shrieking panic at Fox) the situation was addressed, and the disease was contained. Only four cases ever made it to the US, and only one fatality occurred.
But through it all, Fox News was quite literally misinforming the public about the CDC’s handling of a disease that kills you by turning your guts to bloody liquid just so that the network could score political points against a president they didn’t like.
So now, with another fearsome epidemic barreling down on us, what’s happening at Fox?
The same voices that spent the latter half of 2014 raving about how much danger we were in due to the previous administration’s mishandling of the Ebola epidemic just spent the past month performing rhetorical contortionism to explain why this administration’s decision to deny the existence of the crisis and do virtually NOTHING was somehow a brilliant call. And now that the administration is finally doing some of what they should have done two weeks ago (and almost none of what they need to be doing RIGHT NOW) they’re still trying to construct a narrative that makes the president the hero of this story.
But now there’s also something else.
Fear.
Real fear.
Not the shouting outrage of a comfortable news anchor in an expensive suit, but the slow-dawning realization that maybe…just maybe…there is such a thing as expertise. And maybe it matters. The narrative from just a week ago has already fallen apart. “Their guy” isn’t really handling it. And they will be directly affected.
To quote officer Ronnie Peterson, “This isn’t going to end well...”
The scale of this disaster was probably never manageable in the way that the 2014 Ebola outbreak was. But the cost of mismanagement will be far worse than it needed to be.
