Ebola in the United States: How the Media is Promoting Alarm Across Party Lines while Staying True to Political Loyalties

Source: Washington Times

Rather than promoting calm and providing information on the Ebola, a disease that has affected a mere .00000014 percent of the American population, the media's alarmist coverage is making the United States sick with worry. Part of this is due to political ideologies of the media themselves. This debate between alarming and informing the nation on ebola is one that has been questioned by countless people since the discovery of the disease in the U.S. on September 29. With a total of four cases and one death in the United States, the disease can hardly be called an epidemic. This is especially significant in comparison with the death tolls within certain countries in Africa that ebola has ravaged. Yet the media across party lines continues to label ebola in the U.S. as an epidemic, providing coverage that has promoted wide-spread fear throughout the nation rather than extensive knowledge on what is being done to eradicate the disease.

Liberal and Conservative Media Both Promote Alarmist Attitudes in Ebola Coverage, but Conservative Media Promotes Alarm to a Greater Scale

After conducting a content analysis of a total sample of 150 total articles from the conservative Washington Times and the liberal Los Angeles Times, it was found that, both combined and separately, these news sources were alarmist. When comparing the newspapers to each other, the data revealed that, while both media sources promoted alarm over composure, the conservative newspaper significantly promoted alarmist ideas over calm ones as compared to the liberal newspaper. This could be due to political loyalties, as explained by Dr. Kalyani Chadha, an assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College and co-founder of the Journalism Interactive (j/i) conference.

After combining the data from both the Washington Times and Los Angeles Times, it was found that these articles promoted alarm over calm with a ratio of nearly 2.5 to 1. While a total of 230 alarmist words were found within this sample, only 98 words promoting calm were found. When comparing the conservative and liberal newspapers to each other, it was found that the Washington Times favored an alarmist attitude with a ratio of nearly 3.5 to 1 (127 alarmist words to 38 calm words). The liberal Los Angeles Times, however, only favored this attitude with a ratio of less than 2 to 1 (103 alarmist words to 60 calm words). Although an alarmist attitude is held within both newspapers' coverage of ebola in the United States, there is a critical difference in this attitude across party lines. 

The Data was Collected through Content Analysis from a Sample of 75 Liberal and 75 Conservative News Articles

To answer the question of whether the media is promoting media or calm in their coverage of ebola, I used the method of quantitative content analysis in which I first "conceptualized the phenomenon," then created a "research design of the inquiry," and finally administered the "data collection and analysis" (Riffe, D., Lacy, S., & Fico, F, 1998). In my research, I hoped to compare the coverage of ebola between opposite ends of the political spectrum. According to a scale created by political analyst Tim Groseclose, the Washington Times is the most conservative of the major media outlets while the Los Angeles Times was high on the liberal scale. Because of their major difference in political ideology and my ability to access their archives, I chose these two newspapers to compare.

To conduct this research, I collected a total sample of 150 articles, 75 from the Washington Times and 75 from the Los Angeles times, and conducted a content analysis from the headline and introductory paragraph in each article.  I limited the search for the article from the day ebola was discovered in the U.S., September 29, to the day I conducted my research, November 14th. I then conducted the search using the term"ebola United States" in order to limit the articles to those covering the disease in the U.S. rather than in other countries, such as those in Africa. I created a list of several words promoting alarm and ones promoting composure, adding to this list as I read through articles, and tallied the total amount of words promoting alarm and the total amount of words promoting calm in each article. I then added these together and combined the totals to create one bar graph that compromised both newspapers, while also creating a bar graph that tallied the two newspapers separately for comparison.

The alarmist words in the study included alarm, "hostile, unrest, instability, threat,  fear, quarantine, pandemic, plague, mistakes, epidemic, outbreak, deadly, death, terrifying, evil, failure, panic, shortfall, collapse, lethal, hurt, ravaging, mishandled, devastating." The calm words included "aid, fight against,protection,peace, security, treated, precautions, defense, safe, false alarm, relief, overcome, better, safe, improve, preparedness, effort, asyptomatic, care, Ebola-free, released, healthy, calm, response."

Conservative Media Promoting Alarm to Criticize Liberal Obama Presidency      
                                                                                                                         
While both the conservative media (the Washington Times) and the liberal media (the Los Angeles Time) in this study promoted more alarm than calm in their coverage of ebola, the conservative media  promoted alarm on a much greater scale than the liberal media did. Like the coverage of many diseases throughout history, this bias could be due to political loyalties.

Our current president Barack Obama is very much a liberal democrat, and his policies are liberal as well. It is arguable that the conservative media, such as the Washington Times, wants to promote alarm through the population in the goal of critiquing Obama and his response to the disease. Those who write for the Washington Times wold most likely not agree with Obama's policies and would want to dramatize the events under Obama's presidency as worse than they truly are in order to perhaps sway the public away from supporting a liberal, democratic president. While they may not be able to directly say that a conservative approach to ebola would have worked more appropriately, they can create a negative attitude towards the current approach in hopes to draw criticism and possible backlash against the liberal presidency.                                                                                        
                                                                                                                              Source: Los Angeles Times
While the liberal media did promote an alarmist attitude over a calm, informative one, they promoted this calm attitude to a much greater scale than the conservative media did. While the media in general are alarming the nation, the liberal media was more likely to promote the ideas that the disease was being handled under Obama's presidency. Not only did they contain nearly double the more words promoting a calm attitude than the conservative media, but there were several more articles focusing on the recovery of those who did have ebola, as well as the precautions that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the government itself were taking. They were much more eager to shed the issue in a more positive light under the liberal president, giving their audience the true information on the nation's progress of eradicating ebola rather than inducing fear by labeling it as an epidemic.


Data Shows that Alarm in U.S. Over Ebola is Unwarranted 

As the data shows above, the media has an alarmist attitude towards their coverage of ebola across party lines. However, this attitude is unwarranted. Based off of the statistics of ebola in the U.S., it is rash to label the disease as an epidemic in America as many articles in both news sources did. This is especially true when the case of ebola in the U.S. is compared to the statistics of the true ebola epidemic that is occurring in countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. In total, only four cases of ebola and one death of the disease have occurred in the America, which is .000264% of the cases and .000185% of the deaths caused by ebola world-wide. This is hardly what you would call a severe outbreak in the U.S., which is what both the liberal and conservative media have called it.

While many of us may not have known about the devastating effects of ebola in certain African countries, the fear that the country would get to the state of these countries has spread across the United States as a result of the alarmist attitudes in the media. Several of these news sources tended to compare Africa and the United States, although the effects of the disease were and still are extremely different between the U.S. and these countries. Within Africa, the ebola crisis is so extreme that strict precautions are being implemented in everyone's daily lives to prevent the spread of the disease, such as the one described by Mr. James Gachau.

While alarm is of course present and rightfully so in Africa, the alarm that the media has promoted in the United States is unreasonable. Ebola is of course fearful wherever it is, but calling this disease an epidemic, or even a pandemic, in the United States and spawning an alarmist attitude amongst the public has caused much more worry than the disease in the U.S. should receive.

With the small amount of cases and deaths in the U.S., alarm over the devastating deaths in African countries should warrant the alarm that the media has induced in our country over ebola. Rather than base their coverage on readership or political loyalties, media sources should instead choose to provide accurate information rather than promote an alarmist attitude. Fear and chaos amongst the population when unneeded will not only cause the population to lose trust in their leaders, but also could hinder the potential progress that a calm and informed population would create. If the media must uphold an alarmist attitude, they should do so for the countries that truly credit it, such as those in Africa. The media plays a vital role in the beliefs and actions of the American population. Especially in cases of disease coverage, the media should encourage people to keep informed rather than needlessly hide in their closets out of fear.

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