The Press Fears the Country

The media organs are getting hysterical about the Ebola Anti-hysteria hysteria. Shouting “stay calm” at the top of their androgynous voices, they portray the American people as irrational boobs with the vapors.

As I make my way around my community and speak to people throughout the country daily, the only evidence of hysteria about Ebola is in the press. The press takes any concern that Ebola should not be imported from Africa as an indication that people are panicked. The press - print and electronic - are obsessed with Ebola stories. Many of them include reassurances that “all is well.” Even as tens of thousands are catching it and dying in Africa.  Even as doctors and nurses are catching it, the non-doctors in the press assure us that Ebola is very, very hard to catch.

That’s not what most people I know have observed. That’s not what a few moments of refection tells us. I’m not concerned about contracting Ebola primarily for statistical reasons. There have been few cases so far. What I am concerned about is the multiple failures on the part of public health officials. From the President to the CDC to the "Ebola czar" on down they have failed to predict what has happened. Their vaunted “protocols” have been failures. Their repeated reassurances that they have things under control have been wrong.

There is no panic in the streets, but people would like to know that public officials are taking the obvious steps to keep a disease with a 70% fatality rate out of the country. The obvious step is to temporarily stop commercial air travel from those countries where Ebola is an epidemic.  And for this the media is siding with the administration against the people, accusing the people of being hysterical.  For being anti-science.  Science is the new religion, the thing that must not be questioned or be branded as an heretic.  

This may be a teachable moment. Why is the mainstream media so exercised about the people’s natural desire not to be exposed to a deadly disease? A working hypothesis is that the press fears the people.  The people are viewed them as a dangerous animal that must be kept calm lest it rampage out of control.  My theory is that the press see the American people in a negative light. In their view, people in flyover country are a potentially dangerous mob that must be controlled. This feeling of fear is heightened just now because the people they despise are engaged in an election, and it appears that they are going to turn the country away from the direction at the press lords favor. So they call them irrational, citing “government scientists” who tell them that the fear of Ebola is worse that Ebola itself.

The press is losing control of the national conversation. They are afraid. And they are revealing that fear.