If you haven’t subscribed yet to Eric Boehlert’s great new newsletter PRESSRUN, now is the time. We are in the midst of a major public health story and I think people will be following the news on this subject more closely than ever. It’s important to recognize the role the press is going to play in this and be a thoughtful consumer.
Here’s an excerpt of Boehlert’s piece looking back at the media’s response to the ebola crisis in 2014:
As the debacle spreads, I’ve been struck in recent weeks by the press coverage of coronavirus, and specifically Trump’s ineffectual response, compared to how the 2014 Ebola scare in the U.S. under President Barack Obama was covered by the same Beltway press corps. As you may recall, prompted by partisan hysteria voiced by Republicans, the press lost its collective mind covering Ebola and crucified Obama for months, hyping concerns that a deadly domestic outbreak was imminent. By contrast, the press has spent weeks sleepwalking through the Trump coronavirus coverage.
Context: In 2014 there were two cases of Ebola in the United States, total. Already, there have been 14 confirmed cases of coronavirus here, according to the CDC. Yet to date, the coronavirus coverage has produced just a fraction of the Ebola media attention from 2014.
During the height of the Ebola story, in a single week the topic was mentioned nearly 4,000 on the cable news channels, according to TVeyes.com. By comparison, over the last week, “coronavirus” has been mentioned approximately 500 times on the same cable news channels.
Weeks into the coronavirus story, the Washington Post this week finally put a story on its front page about how the spreading epidemic might pose a political problem for Trump, as his administration tries to play catch-up on the health crisis. The media’s slow-footed response fits a larger, well-known pattern that has defined the Trump era, where his shocking behavior routinely produces a fraction of the coverage and condemnation as compared to a Democratic administration. (For instance, do you think if the Obama White House had canceled all White House press briefings the move would be met with shrugs?)
Normalization doesn’t explain this. It’s way beyond that. The media has just thrown up its hands.
Boehlert continues:
As time has passed, I think lots of people forget how often unfair Obama’s press coverage was during his eight years in office. The Ebola scare certainly represented one of the most extreme examples of the D.C. press completely losing its moral compass, as journalists did Republican bidding for weeks with unhinged reporting and commentary.
“The major broadcast and cable networks ran nearly 1000 evening news segments about the Ebola virus in the four weeks leading up to the midterm elections in November, tracking the diagnosis of a handful of U.S. patients,” Media Matters reported in 2014. You read that number correctly — “nearly 1000 evening news segments about Ebola” in four weeks.
Incredibly, the not-so-subtle theme for much of the Ebola coverage was that Obama wasn’t protecting Americans and that ‘big government’ was putting the population at peril. In other words, Ebola was, inexplicably, a political story. Why? Because Republicans went all in during the fall campaign season to turn Ebola into a political story by ginning up wild claims that a Democratic administration could not keep Americans safe from the disease. From Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Ebola is “incredibly contagious.” (Hint: It’s not.)
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza dubbed the Ebola virus the “October surprise” of the 2014 election season and stressed that the panic and anxiety associated with the story was bound to swing votes.
But guess what? It turns out the news media completely lost interest in Ebola right after Republicans lost interest in the story, which is to say right after November’s midterm elections. In May of 2015, when the World Health Organization announced the Ebola health crisis was officially over, most American news outlets covered the story only in passing, compared to the orgy of coverage they produced just months earlier…
So much has happened since then that I think we forget what an impact that crisis had on the 2014 election. There’s evidence that it was substantial.
There’s more at the link. And do sign up for Boehlert’s free newsletter. You’re going to need his sharp media analysis over the next few months. It’s getting crazier out here.