This morning, the better half has some thoughts the media coverage of the Ebola epidemic. Her point is that everytime people start to ask reasonable questions about Ebola, the media lecture them not to panic. The truth is that nobody’s really panicked about the Ebola epidemic (yet), but by preempting any dialogue about our level of readiness with a patronizing insistence that there’s no need to worry, the media leave people even more unsettled than they would have been if we’d just had a frank discussion about the risks to begin with. If you want to see what that frank discussion looks like, see my colleague Jonathan Last’s excellent piece on Ebola. As for the media’s patronizing responses, the boss — who just joined Twitter! — makes a good and succinct point in response to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
I hope no one else gets #Ebola–but one can’t now know if others will or not. RT @chrislhayes: New Yorkers: You’re not going to get Ebola.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 24, 2014
Even if the odds are overwhelmingly against contracting Ebola, it’s fairly rational to be worried about a horrific plague that has already infected thousands of people. The way to reassure people is to honestly tell them about what’s being done to counter the risks of it spreading further. Insisting that you shouldn’t worry about it actually makes things worse. It’s an apocalyptic version of the “don’t think of an elephant” problem. With Ebola already in the news, telling people over and over there’s no need to contemplate bleeding from their eyeballs is going to cause them to do just that.
Further, the smug certitude amplifies fears when the media turn out to be wrong. And, at times, they’ve been pretty darn wrong in their hasty attempt to avert nonexistent Ebola panic:
Ebola has up to an 18% chance of coming to America. Here’s why you don’t need to panic. http://t.co/I7QsRoYHzT pic.twitter.com/73zanOwsjv
— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 7, 2014
To some extent, this is just another way that the media are at once disdainful of their readers, and insecure about their self-declared expertise. And they should be insecure, because they are not experts in virology. Or economics, nutrition, religion, or any of the myriad subjects the media regularly get wrong. They can’t tell the future, but they act like they can. And they sure can’t reliably predict human behavior. When it comes to situations such as the Ebola crisis, there are, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, a lot of “unknown unknowns.” Situations like this call for humility and facts first, pronouncements later.
However, the Ebola coverage is just the latest example of a familiar process. It’s a common enough phenomenon that I suggested it needs a name, and a couple of smart friends suggested I call it “hacklash.” I’ll take a stab at fleshing out the problem: Again and again we see the media and political establishment, which frequently collude, trying to preempt calls for honesty and accountability by enforcing some elite consensus that’s dismissive of the need to address institutional failures. There’s a dismissal of legitimate concerns, right up until the facts finally overwhelm the preferred narrative and prompt some degree of public outrage. When the public inevitably gets wise, it’s often before the media catch up, but usually too late to have avoided some secondary consequence or disaster. Each failure leaves the public more distrustful than they were before, and this necessitates even more aggressive attempts to ratchet up the elite consensus. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is basically the story of the Obama presidency, where nearly all of the staggering failures and crises–Ebola, ISIS, Obamacare, Benghazi, et al.–have played out in a similar fashion.
Anyway, I’m much less worried about contracting Ebola than I am about the dismissive reaction to it. Hacklash appears to be a cyclical problem, and as an indicator of the health of our Republic, I don’t see how this ends well.
