The Dangerous Myth of America's Ebola Panic
In reality, twice as many Americans believe in witches as are afraid of Ebola. At what point does the media's coverage of the country's "overreaction" to the virus become another overreaction?
Ebola is everywhere—on television, on the radio, in newspapers, and across the Internet. If you have consumed even a drop of the voluminous virus coverage in the last few weeks, you probably know that this is a real and terrible health crisis in Africa, but not quite a crisis in the United States, where one person has died from the virus.
But does it ever seem like everybody in America is freaking out about Ebola, except for you? The thrust of responsible mainstream coverage, particularly on the Internet, cable news, and Sunday morning talk shows (not this stuff), has focused on the fact that too many Americans are freaking out, and they ought to stop. The front page of CNN.com today is a textbook example:
A 2005 study by Schwarz and others exposed old and young adults to myths like “Shark cartilage is good for your arthritis,” which were correctly labeled as false. All participants could identify the myths immediately after the test. But three days later, the gauntlet of warnings had backfired, particularly for older adults, many of whom suddenly associated shark cartilage with arthritis relief. "Because explicit memory declines faster with age than implicit memory,” Schwarz wrote, "older adults could not recall whether the statement was originally marked as true or false but still experienced its content as highly familiar, leading them to accept it as true.”
Another study found that when participants heard repeated phrases like “the wax used to line Cup-o-Noodles cups has been shown to cause cancer in rats,” they were more likely to be attribute it to a respected source like Consumer Reports than to a less-respected source like National Enquirer, even if the original phrases were accurately labeled.
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This is not a comprehensive case against myth-busting. The truth needs advocates. But the danger of repeating myths, even when honestly trying to bust them, is that repetition has a way of turning misinformation into information. Just as both Gallup and the Pew Research Center were reporting that Americans weren't too afraid of Ebola, the Washington Post reported that its own poll revealed a super-majority of the country is "concerned" about the "possibility" of the virus becoming widespread. Good news organizations are telling Americans the truth about Ebola while also inviting them to see panic as normal and mainstream. If containment can fight the virus, maybe similar discretion could be used to fight the panic.