Media goes overtime on Ebola coverage, but not necessarily overboard
Theres a potentially deadly disease afoot in America, with no known cure and terrifying consequences for those infected.
Ebola? Well, yes, but another bug has had far more wide-ranging consequences. Since an outbreak began in late summer, the enterovirus has sent thousands of people, primarily children, to hospitals in 43 states and the District. One strain, enterovirus D68, has apparently caused polio-like symptoms in some patients, leaving them unable to move their limbs. Four people who recently died tested positive for the disease, although the link between the virus and the deaths is unclear, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You might not know all that from the news medias reporting over the past few weeks. The enterovirus certainly hasnt been ignored, but its a mere footnote compared with the oceanic volumes devoted to Ebola, a disease that has devastated parts of West Africa but has only one confirmed case diagnosed in the United States. CNN has been especially relentless, chasing down every conceivable Ebola angle and a few inconceivable ones, too. One segment explored the possibility of catching Ebola from a sneeze, a pet or a swimming pool (the expert answers: really rare, no evidence for that and highly unlikely, respectively).
For the most part, the reporting on medical aspects of the disease has been straightforward and responsible, with many stories emphasizing the relatively low risks of infection. A few commentaries, meanwhile, have lapsed into xenophobia about the African sources of the disease. One Fox News pundit, Andrea Tantaros, offered this analysis last week: In these countries they dont believe in traditional medical care. So someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor who practices Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion that includes ritual animal sacrifice.
But even when the reporting is accurate, the sheer tonage of it raises a question about proportion and relative risk: Why is Ebola a media superstar when other diseases say, enterovirus or the common flu have more far-reaching and even deadlier consequences in this country?
The question is a familiar one to people involved in spreading the word about public-health threats. News reporting, they say, typically underplays some risks and overplays others. Mundane behaviors smoking, overeating dont rate sustained media coverage yet are linked to preventable diseases that kill tens of thousands annually. Ordinary viruses, such as the flu, take a huge toll as well but dont rate screaming headlines.
If any or all of these issues received the levels of media coverage and public concern that Ebola was receiving, thousands of annual deaths could be prevented, said Jay Bernhardt, the founding director of the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas. The volume of Ebola coverage, he said, reminds me a lot of the over-the-top coverage of serial killers or celebrity scandals in that they are far out of proportion with the risk or relevance to the general population.
Social-science research has shown that intensive news reporting on certain diseases can distort public perceptions of their severity and the chances of contracting them. In a 2008 experiment at McMaster University in Ontario that was updated last year, researchers asked undergraduates and medical students their impressions of 10 infectious diseases. Five of the diseases (anthrax, SARS, West Nile virus, Lyme disease and avian flu) had received relatively more news media coverage than a second group of five.
Result: The high-media frequency diseases were rated as more serious than the more obscure diseases by both the undergraduates and the medical students. Both groups overestimated the chances they would get one of the better-reported diseases.
But thats not to say that the media is over-covering a particular threat, said Meredith Young, the lead researcher on the studies, who now works at Montreals McGill University. It really only is in hindsight that we can say whether a potential threat was over- or undercovered in the media and what the real risk was of that particular infectious disease, she wrote in an e-mail. That is, did the threat materialize? Or did the media coverage help to prevent the threat by warning of a potential contagion and mobilizing preventive action?
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Media goes overtime on Ebola coverage, but not necessarily overboard