“New Depths Of Shamelessness”: Chicken Little Media Keeps Reaching New Lows
One time, my wife and I went walking near a pasture where nine mares grazed. I knew them all by name. Suddenly and for no obvious reason the herd stampeded, galloping by as if their lives depended upon it. It was a thrilling sight, like being right down on the rail at the race track.
But what were they running from? There are no predators around here capable of harming a horse. As the leaders thundered by, I noticed two fillies at the back getting skeptical. They kept looking behind and catching each other’s eye as if to say “What’s this about? I don’t see anything, do you?”
As the fillies pulled up, the leaders thundered headlong into a run-in shed about 100 yards ahead and stopped. The proximate cause of the stampede had been a fat black horse fly on the boss mare’s rump. As soon as she went under the roof, the insect flew off.
It was quite comical, actually.
We Americans didn’t used to be like that. We prided ourselves on being a pragmatic, self-confident people — more like the skeptical fillies than the thundering herd. But if you believe a lot of what you read in the news media and see on TV, much of the public currently lives on the edge of panic.
The role of cable TV news channels in stoking hysteria has reached new depths of shamelessness. They do it purely for the ratings, you know.
And if you don’t, the barbaric propagandists of ISIS certainly do.
Typical headlines: “ISIS Threat: Fear of Terror Attack Soars to 9/11 High, NBC News/WSJ Poll Finds.” By the ghastly tactic of beheading American and British citizens on TV, Islamic extremists fighting to establish a Sunni fundamentalist “caliphate” have stampeded the nation.
Millions of Americans who wanted out of Middle Eastern sectarian wars now think the U.S needs to get back in.
If ISIS’s goals are insane, so are their tactics. Politically speaking, no U.S. president could have failed to react to the organization’s mad provocations. Exactly how President Obama’s bombing campaign will end, nobody can say — although that hasn’t stopped a thousand propagandists from trying.
Invading Iraq at all was the big mistake, and it says here that getting sucked back in to yet another Middle Eastern ground war would be to repeat it. A big part of the problem is the unreasoning fear, far out of proportion to any actual threat the nation faces.
Although my saying so infuriated certain readers, I once wrote that Osama bin Laden’s “deluded followers posed no military threat to the integrity of the United States or any Western nation. At worst they were capable of theatrical acts of mass murder like the 9/11 attacks. And that was sufficient evil indeed.”
But fear made us reckless. I’d say the same about ISIS. For all its ruthlessness, ISIS has no Air Force, no Navy, and a ragtag Army incapable of projecting power anywhere but the desert wastes of Iraq and Syria. Helping the Kurds defend themselves against a genocidal massacre is one thing; trying to impose a pax Americana on the entire region quite another.
Quivering in our beds for fear of a terrorist strike should be beneath the American people. It’s impossible to respect shameless politicians like Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton, who actually warned viewers on a TV town hall that ISIS terrorists might collaborate with Mexican drug cartels to “infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.”
Armies of Mexican Islamic terrorists descending upon El Dorado and Texarkana! For somebody who comes advertised as brainy, Cotton appears incapable of concealing how dumb he thinks voters are.
Then there’s Ebola, which cable TV also shamelessly hypes for ratings. “I’ve followed cable news for many, many years now,” writes The Daily Banter’s Bob Cesca “and not since the lead-up to the Iraq War has the American news media behaved with such recklessness.”
Among a hundred possible examples, Cesca was aghast at CNN’s interviewing novelist Robin Cook, who once wrote a thriller about a conspiracy to spread Ebola foiled by a hero-doctor.
“The real issue here is how quickly it can mutate, and how that’s gonna affect the transmission…” Cook said. “Perhaps this virus cannot live very long in the air. I don’t know. But I don’t think anybody knows.”
Actually, people do know. Every professional health agency in the world agrees that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air. As for mutating, Scientific American reports that there’s “almost no historical precedent for any virus to change its basic mode of transmission so radically.”
The real thing is bad enough without spreading lurid disinformation.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 15, 2014
“Unbridled Opportunism”: Republicans Want You To Be Terrified Of Ebola—So You’ll Vote For Them
The first transmission of Ebola within the United States, from Liberian visitor Thomas Eric Duncan to a Dallas nurse, marked a turning point in the political dialogue surrounding the virus toward an unbridled opportunism. The subsequent diagnosis of a second nurse and other revelations—that she took a flight shortly before she began showing symptoms, apparently with Centers for Disease Control’s approval—have only accelerated it. Obviously a degree of paranoia and sensationalism has colored the Ebola story since long before this week. But this week’s developments provided conservatives the psychological ammunition they needed to justify using the specter of a major Ebola outbreak as an election-year base-mobilization strategy.
Republican candidates like Scott Brown are now in on the game, and so is House Speaker John Boehner. Fox News, with the exception of Shepard Smith, is ginning up more Ebola terror than CNN, which had been the vanguard of Ebola hysteria until this week. Matt Drudge’s call to panic was not only deranged—
self-quarantine
—but unintentionally self-defeating, as one cannot vote if one is self-quarantined.
Engaging in the politics of fear requires a pretense. You can find people who hype mortal danger, without a sheen of plausibility, shouting into bullhorns on street corners. Politicians and their enablers need persuasive stories that make the threats sound real. And the story that many conservatives are telling about Ebola goes something like this: We’d love to eschew hysteria, and we’d love to believe our public health officials can break the chain of transmission within the U.S., but the Obama administration has proven itself untrustworthy.
“This is an episode when people want to trust the government, people need to trust the government and they can’t,” columnist George Will intoned on Fox News earlier this month. “What was happening exactly 12 months ago? A government shutdown and the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. Since then we’ve had intelligence failures regarding ISIS; we’ve had the debacle of the veterans handling of healthcare; and the Secret Service that couldn’t lock the front door of the White House. So people think this is a gang that can’t shoot straight.”
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds repackaged Will’s basic argument in USA Today on Monday. Among those he cited was “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, who added lost IRS emails, Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and the child-migrant crisis to the litany. Members of the media are enabling this opportunism. They should be anathematizing it.
The competence argument is appealing because it doesn’t require dabbling in pseudoscience or xenophobia—just healthy skepticism of our governing institutions. Moreover, I’m certain this sort of skepticism does help explain why a large minority of people in the U.S. feels at risk of contracting Ebola. But they are at no great risk. That the risk is provably infinitesimal underscores the fact that the issue with Ebola isn’t the virus itself so much as paranoia about it.
Even if each of the failures and crises enumerated above were as unambiguous and damning as the administration’s critics claim, it doesn’t follow that federal health officials aren’t up to the task of controlling Ebola, or that the public at large faces any meaningful risk. It might follow that we shouldn’t believe this season’s Affordable Care Act enrollment period will be glitch-free, and that the Vetrerans Affairs’s problems won’t be solved with new management alone. The point is not that we should never draw inferences from this administration’s previous failings. But it’s a fallacy to arbitrarily extend that second-guessing to the Ebola containment effort, while at the same time happily taking it for granted that the vast majority of things we entrust the government to do will continue apace.
Ebola carries a crucial mix of novelty, visibility, and lethality that ripens it for demagogy. But conservatives have selected a familiar line of demagogy—that you can’t trust the government to administer things and solve problems—and imposed it on to a situation where stoking reflexive distrust of the government tugs at the lid of a big Pandora’s box.
The sad irony is that state and local institutions, so beloved on the right, were apparently out to sea when Ebola arrived in Dallas, and health officials there would have let things drift further into chaos had the federal government not intruded further. Not that they’ve performed flawlessly, but we need more of their expertise and involvement, not less. Texas Governor Rick Perry—who in gentler times plays footsie with secession—is grateful for this intrusion, and has “great faith” that their efforts will succeed. Perhaps he’ll surprise us further by dismissing the idea that the federal officials who’ve stepped up against Ebola shouldn’t be trusted because about a year ago, some federal healthcare website was beset by glitches.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, October 16, 2014
“Politics Of Fear, Getting Worse”: Scott Brown Combines ISIS, Ebola, And Border Security
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was dismissive yesterday of an unfounded concern: Islamic State terrorists using the Ebola virus. In remarks to the Association of the United States Army, Johnson specifically said, “We’ve seen no specific credible intelligence that [ISIS] is attempting to use any sort of disease or virus to attack our homeland.”
That’s good to hear, of course, but the fact that it was necessary for the DHS secretary to make these comments was itself rather striking.
As a friend reminded me yesterday, we’ve heard quite a bit about possible threats from ISIS terrorists; and we’ve heard plenty about the dangers of Ebola; but we’ve apparently entered a new phase in which ISIS may strike with Ebola.
And where is such talk coming from? Greg Sargent reported yesterday on the latest remarks from former Sen. Scott Brown (R), now running in New Hampshire after losing two years ago in Massachusetts. In this case, the Republican was asked whether he supports travel restrictions on countries in West Africa. Brown replied:
“We need a comprehensive approach and I think that should be part of it. I think it’s all connected. For example, we have people coming into our country by legal means bringing in diseases and other potential challenges. Yet we have a border that’s so porous that anyone can walk across it. I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have those types of diseases and/or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist. And yet we do nothing to secure our border.”
Brown has dabbled in this before, but I think this was the most direct he’s been to date to tie together the disparate threads of terrorism, Ebola, and border security, all at the same time, all in the hopes of exploiting public anxiety to advance his personal ambitions. (North Carolina’s Thom Tillis recently pushed a similar tack, though he didn’t go for the full trifecta.)
The politics of fear isn’t pretty, and as Brown makes clear, it’s getting worse. The public can, however, take at least some comfort in the fact that the New England Republican doesn’t seem to have any idea what he’s talking about.
For example, Brown believes “that anyone can walk across” the border because “we do nothing to secure” it. For an issue the Republican claims to take seriously, he’s badly confused – border security is actually at an all-time high.
But the more amusing takeaway is the degree to which the right wants to connect every story to its unrelated goal. Want to improve the economy? Secure the border. Want to fight terrorism? Secure the border. Worried about public health? Secure the border. Worried about crime? Secure the border.
If you’ve got a problem, Republicans have a border that needs securing.
It’s reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney era, when just about every possible challenge – economy, energy policy, terrorism, health care – was met with a call to cut taxes.
Of course, the difference is, when it comes to immigration, Democrats are fully prepared to give Republicans the exact border-security measures the GOP wants as part of a comprehensive reform package. It’s a shame Republicans won’t consider a compromise.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 15, 2014
“Tea Party’s Ebola Paranoia”: Why GOP’s Fear-Mongering Is Just A Cynical Turnout Strategy
There’s good news in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday night: Most Americans believe the government is ready to handle a possible Ebola outbreak, even as a second Dallas health worker has contracted the disease. But if you want to understand why the GOP is fear-mongering on the issue, you’ve got to analyze the poll results more closely.
Some 56 percent of Americans say the government is prepared to handle Ebola, including 61 percent of Democrats. But that number is flipped on its head when you ask Tea Party voters: 57 percent of them say the government is not prepared, as do 54 percent of rural voters. So two core components of the GOP red-state base coalition don’t trust the federal government, in the person of President Obama, to keep them safe – and there’s some political opportunity for Republicans in those numbers. When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz continues to insist “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” those are the voters he’s talking to.
The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent makes the excellent point that one big political benefit of Ebola to the GOP is that it gives them a theme with which to nationalize the election and make it about the perceived failures of President Obola – I mean Obama – especially in states like Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, where vulnerable Democrats have kept it close by focusing on local issues and their GOP opponents’ foibles. That’s why Thom Tillis is insisitng that Sen. Kay Hagan has “failed the people of North Carolina and the nation by not securing our border.”
The poll had more good news than bad for the forces of calm and reason: 49 percent of Americans thought the CDC is doing a good job, compared to 22 percent who said it wasn’t. Other polls have given us a little more to worry about: Last week’s Rutgers-Eagleton survey of New Jersey voters found that 69 percent were at least somewhat concerned about the disease spreading here – and that people who were paying the most attention to TV actually knew the least about the disease, and were the most frightened.
That’s an unusual finding: People who pay the most attention to coverage of a political issue usually know the most about it when polled. But not when it comes to Ebola. “The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding,” the pollster told reporters. No data on whether they were mostly watching Fox, where Bill O’Reilly is calling for the resignation of the respected CDC head Tom Frieden (the sensible Greta Van Susteren called her colleague out here.)
That same NBC/WSJ poll showed Republicans with a generic two point lead over Democrats in the coming midterm elections, 46-44. Again, the best thing I can say about continued polling is: It could be worse for Dems. That same poll had Republicans up by 7 at the same point, and they went on to deliver a “shellacking.” The poll was tied 45-45 in 2012, when President Obama won re-election and Democrats gained seats in Congress.
Even better, Democrats are leading Republicans among registered voters in the top-11 Senate races, 47 percent to 42 percent. So Democrats should expect losses, but it’s still not looking like a wave year. Unless Republicans can use Ebola and ISIS to drive out their voters, and Democratic voters stay home.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 15, 2014
“Scarier Than Ebola”: On Matters Exotic, We’re Rapt; On Matters Quotidian, We’re Cavalier
We Americans do panic really well.
We could use a few pointers on prudence.
Do me a favor. Turn away from the ceaseless media coverage of Ebola in Texas — the interviews with the Dallas nurse’s neighbors, the hand-wringing over her pooch, the instructions on protective medical gear — and answer this: Have you had your flu shot? Are you planning on one?
During the 2013-2014 flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza, even though it kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year, nearly 50,000 in a bad one.
These are deaths by a familiar assassin. Many of them could have been prevented. So why aren’t we in a lather over that? Why fixate on remote threats that we feel we can’t control when there are immediate ones that we simply don’t bother to?
On matters exotic, we’re rapt. On matters quotidian, which are nonetheless matters of life and death, we’re cavalier. Tens of thousands of Americans die in car crashes annually, and according to a federal analysis from 2012, more than half of them weren’t wearing seatbelts.
Perhaps that didn’t make a difference in many cases. In some, it probably did. But on this front, as on others, we have clear answers about how to minimize risk and we simply proceed to forget or ignore them.
There’s no way to square skin-cancer statistics in the United States — more than 3.5 million cases diagnosed yearly and almost 10,000 deaths — with the number of Americans showing off their tans. They aren’t all getting body paint. They’ve been lectured about sunscreen and shade and hats. But vanity trumps sanity, and melanoma rides its coattails.
I’m not dismissing the horror of Ebola, a full-blown crisis in Africa that should command the whole world’s assistance. And Ebola in the United States certainly warrants concern. We’re still searching for definitive answers about transmission and prevention.
But Americans already have such answers about a host of other, greater perils to our health, and we’d be wiser to reacquaint ourselves with those, and recommit to heeding them, than to worry about our imminent exposure to Ebola.
“People get very fearful and stressed out and have a lot of anxiety about things like Ebola that aren’t a general health risk,” said Jeffrey Duchin, who is the chairman of the public health committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “Just look at causes of death in the United States. Everything is higher than Ebola, and there are things that we can do about many of them.”
Duchin, a physician, moderated a panel of experts who discussed Ebola at the society’s conference last week. These doctors sought to refocus attention on influenza, which lacks novelty but not potency.
In my conversation with him, Duchin also pointed out that between 2.7 and 5.2 million Americans are believed to be infected with the hepatitis C virus. Deaths related to it can range widely, from 17,000 to 80,000 annually, he said. There’s a test for it. There’s effective treatment. But the C.D.C. says that up to 75 percent of the people with the virus don’t know they have it.
Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told me: “We have a lot of vaccine-preventable diseases and we see more and more people refusing to have their children take vaccines.”
He was referring to outbreaks of measles and pertussis (or whooping cough) in states and cities where parents have hallucinated a connection between immunizations and autism. They cling to this fiction in the face of scientific information to the contrary.
Both The Hollywood Reporter and Time magazine recently published accounts of anti-vaccine madness among supposedly educated, affluent Americans in particular. According to the story in The Hollywood Reporter, by Gary Baum, the parents of 57 percent of the children at a Beverly Hills preschool and of 68 percent at one in Santa Monica had filed personal-belief exemptions from having their kids vaccinated.
Such numbers, Baum wrote, “are in line with immunization rates in developing countries like Chad and South Sudan.”
On CNN on Monday night, a Dallas pediatrician was asked about what she had advised the families she sees. She said that she urged them to have their children “vaccinated against diseases that we can prevent,” and that she also stressed frequent hand-washing. Ebola or no Ebola, it’s a responsible — and frequently disregarded — way to lessen health risks.
So are these: fewer potato chips. Less sugary soda. Safer sex. Tighter restrictions on firearms. More than 30,000 Americans die from gunshots every year. Anyone looking for an epidemic to freak out about can find one right there.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 15, 2014
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