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A Heartening Moment from Cable News
Let’s get this out of the way up front: all cable news networks are loud, dumb, and overproduced. To the extent that Fox is better than its competition, it’s because it’s loud, dumb, overproduced and fairly conservative (by the way, I exempt from this criticism Special Report, Red Eye, and Neil Cavuto’s show, all of which strike me as magnificently well done). Still, I regard the sound of cable news droning on in the background as tantamount to hearing the whirring of the drills from your dentist’s waiting room. I’ve long wanted to get the capital together to create a cable news network for people like me — one where Sam Elliot reads the news at a deliberate pace while sipping scotch in a leather wingback chair. Were the CNN moniker not taken, we’d call it the Coolidge News Network and our tagline would be “Sit down, shut up, and everything will be fine.”
With that in mind, I’m grateful anytime that a low-blood pressure impulse manages to find its way onto the airwaves. And, unlikely candidate though he is, Shepard Smith managed to do it yesterday:
Now, Shep’s rap here isn’t perfect (for one thing, I think it’s excessively reductionist to say that Ebola is what’s tanking the market), but it’s nice to see a talking head bringing a bucket of water to the fire rather than one filled with gasoline. None of this is to say that there aren’t real issues here — the scrutiny that the CDC and the Obama Administration have come under, for instance, strikes me as more than deserved. But there are rational fears and then there’s gratuitous hysteria. Too often, the model of cable news is to elide the distinction between the two. It’s nice to see the impulse cutting in the other direction for once.
Published in General
Think of the real estate investment opportunities!
Too soon?
I will start to think about maybe becoming concerned when someone who has had zero contact whatsoever with anybody from Western Africa or with a health care professional dealing directly with an Ebola patient is confirmed to be infected. That will be evidence that the virus has gotten “outside the bubble”
On the other hand, even then the outbreak would have to be more widespread than other deadly diseases which are relatively common and yet do not generate nearly as much press coverage.
For example, didja know that there were four confirmed cases of Pneumonic Plague in Colorado this past summer (no deaths though)? Seems to me that the freakin’ plague would be cause for a nice media frenzy, and yet not so much.
Or, how about the 10,000 or so cases (and about 500 deaths) per year of Tuberculosis in the United States?
One reason why Ebola causes such press is precisely because we have so little data on how well it spreads and/or kills in a developed country. People are afraid because they don’t know if they should be afraid or not. We simply don’t have the data, and the only way to get the data would be to allow the virus to spread a bit (an option I generally recommend against).
Are we panicking? Not noticeably, in terms of observable actions. (Discussing and speculating, yes)
Should we panic?: Probably not, panic is seldom useful.
Why would a newsreader or a pundit “scold” the viewer/reader for panicking?: Perhaps because the newsreaders and pundits consider “alarmed discussion” to be *their* purview, and don’t want amateurs muscling in?