You know a story is reaching its saturation point when the coverage of the story becomes the story.
That has been the case lately with the Ebola story. The quality and quantity
of the coverage of this disease is being discussed all over the place -- adding to the quantity of coverage, but not necessarily enhancing the quality of it.
Let’s break it down. At the
center of this story is a word -- “ebola” -- that almost everyone has heard of by now, but almost no one fully understands. This lack of understanding has some people criticizing the media
for not explaining the science of this disease effectively.
You could watch or read a mountain of stories on Ebola and not be certain if you can catch it from a guy sitting three rows behind
you on a plane who has the disease and sneezes during your flight.
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I’ve watched reports on TV in which experts insist this disease can spread through the air, while other experts avow
that that’s not true -- that you have to come into contact with a sick person’s bodily fluids such as sweat, saliva and presumably blood to contract the disease.
Which is
it? Who knows? You can see how medical personnel who have gotten the disease might have come into contact with these fluids, especially if they weren’t wearing proper hazmat gear. But what about
the NBC cameraman who contracted the disease while covering the story in Africa? How did a guy wielding a camera come into contact with an Ebola patient’s bodily fluids? Perhaps he didn’t,
but caught the disease just by being around these patients.
And why did he get the disease, while NBC’s medical correspondent, Nancy Snyderman, did not? She is not reported to be ill,
but she is in hot water for not quarantining herself and might lose her job.
So the science of the disease is not well-understood by most of us -- and possibly isn’t even understood by
experts. But the scientific or medical angle is just one of the angles from which this story is being covered. One other angle is the political one being taken up chiefly by the cable news channels
because we are closing in on the important mid-term elections.
The stories generally concern how candidates -- particularly Republican ones -- are using the Ebola “crisis” to
bludgeon the Obama administration and, by extension, incumbent Democrats in the House and Senate for neglect or incompetence in their response to this disease.
Thus, you have Fox News Channel
on the right banging the drum for Republicans who have taken up the Ebola cudgel, and MSNBC on the left adopting a “how dare they” attitude about Republicans who have made this health
issue into a central issue of their political campaigns. Meanwhile, for middle-of-the-road CNN, the Ebola story has moved to the top of the news list, where it is grabbing the lion’s share of
CNN airtime (and helping to spur the discussion decrying the “saturation” coverage of this story).
Meanwhile, the number of people in the U.S. who have actually had this disease
can be counted on one hand. Without meaning to diminish or underplay the tragedy of one patient’s death from the disease here (compared with thousands who have died in Africa), you might
actually come to the conclusion that something the authorities are doing here in the United States might actually be working, even if these very same authorities can’t seem to explain adequately
what they’re doing.
Where the “journalism” of the Ebola epidemic is concerned, the problem might be geographic. The fact is that Ground Zero for this Ebola story is in the
African countries where it is wreaking the most havoc. But news producers here in the U.S. believe, rightly or wrongly, that this story won’t resonate with -- or more to the point, attract --
sufficient numbers of viewers unless it is relatable to their own lives. Thus, you get a lot of overheated coverage of the tiny handful of cases that have turned up here, and comparatively few stories
on the suffering over there. Or so it seems.
This question of coverage-saturation comes up every time there is an ongoing story of any kind. And I have adopted a standard response: Our news
media can hardly be expected to ignore this story. And you can hardly expect some news channels (or, for that matter, newspapers or Web sites) to start dialing down their coverage as long as everyone
else continues to cover it.
That’s not how the world works, or how the news business works. To those news consumers who say they’re still confused by the nature of this disease
despite the wall-to-wall coverage of this story, then I can only say that that is the nature of the beast -- lots of noise but very little understanding.