Newsweek magazine’s recent cover story about Ebola is suggestive of larger failings in the way the spread of the disease has been covered by the international media. Focusing on “bushmeat” – “beloved,” we are told, “by many African-born Americans, despite the fact that it is illegal in the U.S.” – the Newsweek story suggests that African game smuggled in to the US may give the Ebola virus a “backdoor” to the United States. The speculative drift of the piece, and Newsweek’s cover image – a chimpanzee – have been widely condemned for scaremongering and xenophobia; but while they may provide little valid information about the Ebola crisis, they do show the persistence of supposedly outmoded stereotypes about the “global south.”
In a sharply worded post-mortem on the Newsweek story, a Washington Post media blog comments on the “long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place.” Sifting through, and dismissing, most of Newsweek’s evidence, the authors note the “persistent association of immigrants and disease in American society” and they recall the prison-like detention of HIV positive Haitian refugees in Guantanamo Bay and the panic over New York’s Chinatown during the 2003 SARS epidemic – even though not a single case of the disease had been recorded there. Further examples of the ways in which deep-seated preconceptions affect public opinion might include America’s periodic over-reactions to illegal immigration, and its increasingly alarmist response to the resurgence of Islamism in the Middle East.
The persistence of media stereotypes in the developed world, particularly those of foreigners or minorities, can exert a decisive influence on political action. If nothing else it creates political will for intervention – or refraining from intervention – in far-off countries. One well-known instance of this was the 1990 testimony, before the ‘Congressional Human Rights Caucus,’ of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl. Identified only as Nayirah, the girl delivered an eyewitness account of Iraqi soldiers rampaging through a hospital in Kuwait City, pulling babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. Later on, after the US had committed its military forces to the liberation of Kuwait, it turned out that Nayirah’s testimony had been fabricated, and that she was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Ambassador to the United States.
To date, coverage of the Ebola outbreaks has not been handled with anything like this level of cynicism – even though some Western pharmaceutical companies clearly have an interest in being well thought of as they race to find a cure. However, as with the developed world’s previous indifference to a protracted and sanguinary multinational conflict in the Congo, events in Africa have proved too complex for many international news agencies. Simplistic reportage, like the Newsweek story, often misrepresents the spread of the virus as a vague, easily globalized threat rather than a fairly localized crisis that requires a compassionate and well-coordinated international response. Slipshod reporting and misinformation abound.
Informed observers agree that the scale of the current outbreak owes more to the inadequate healthcare systems in the affected countries than it does to the virulence of the disease. Nevertheless British Airways recently cancelled its flights to Sierra Leone, and there was a mildly hysterical response within the US to news that Ebola victims would receive treatment on American soil. While the disease remains incurable, and may be evolving as it spreads, the 90% death rate that has been widely reported significantly overstates the actual figure of 50%-55%.
The spread of Ebola is a major health crisis and the international community needs to respond to it with urgency and intelligence. When age-old stereotypes about the diseased, dirty, ‘Dark Continent’ are casually recycled by a well-known news agency, this response becomes needlessly complicated by fear and misunderstanding.
