Thank you Miles O'Brien
by digby
Finally:
PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien on Sunday bemoaned the media's coverage of Ebola, criticizing Fox News in particular.
"I wish everybody could take a deep breath and take a break from trying to pull viewers in by scaring them. And that’s what we’re seeing here. It borders on irresponsibility when people get on television and start talking that way when they should know better," he said on CNN's "Reliable Sources."
O'Brien said that journalists have been hyping the Ebola outbreak and the first case in the United States just to draw in viewers.
"That’s a shame to even say that, and I get embarrassed for our brethren in journalism," he said.
CNN host Brian Stelter then played a clip of Fox News' Andrea Tantaros warning that Africans will "seek treatment from a witch doctor" if infected with Ebola.
"Well, we could digress into what motivated that, and perhaps the racial component of all this, the arrogance, the first world verses third world statements and implications," O'Brien said about the clip. "It’s offensive on several levels. And it reflects a level of ignorance, which we should not allow in our media and in our discourse."
I wrote about the witch doctor thing here.
The bigger problem, as I see it, that the news nets are conflating "threats" all the time ISIS-Ebola-Border-Immigrants-Beheadings into one big story about how the world is exploding and we're right in the middle of it all --- indeed, we're the focus of it all. It's just one big, horrible threat.
Irresponsible is too tame a word. Immoral is more like it.
.