How NOT to write about public health
issues, courtesy of then-tyro Maureen Dowd.
I was raised in a public health atmosphere. I also wrote the first national cover story on Herpes in 1980, years before Maureen Dowd and TIME Magazine engaged in the shameless fear-mongering of their 1982 “HERPES: TODAY’S SCARLET LETTER” cover article. So this is not new ground for me. It may be for you. Therefore: hearken.
The Case for Panic
Matthew Continetti / Washington Free BeaconDeadly, irrational, and determined, the intruder snuck across a weakened perimeter. Eluding capture, the intruder was detained only after missteps and close calls. The spin began soon after the threat was isolated. Information was selectively leaked…
And that’s just the opening fun. Here’s perhaps the single most irresponsible medical paragraph I’ve read in three decades:
This is staphylococcus. Not ebola. Just for illustration. You can breathe now.
I have a second opinion. Not only do I disagree with the constant stream of soothing and complacent rhetoric from Dr. Zeke’s friends in government and media. I also believe it is entirely rational to fear the possibility of a major Ebola outbreak, of a threat to the president and his family, of jihadists crossing the border, of a large-scale European or Asian war, of nuclear proliferation, of terrorists detonating a weapon of mass destruction. These dangers are real, and pressing, and though the probability of their occurrence is not high, it is amplified by the staggering incompetence and failure and misplaced priorities of the U.S. government. It is not Ebola I am afraid of. It is our government’s ability to deal with Ebola.
Right. And it is not Right-wingers’ thinking that I fear. It is its opposite, which seems to be the characterizing motif of their non-thought amygdala-driven fight or flight politics.
This poltroon, writing for Michael Goldfarb’s scrofulous Washington Free Beacon (see here for more on Goldfarb’s career of smear) breaks the first rule of public health medicine:
FIRST: CAUSE NO PANIC.
Why?
Hip outerwear for the physician treating the Plague
(Black Death, the Bubonic Plague)
Because panic can kill more people than the disease.
But in Rightie World, the point of the November election is to terrify their potential voters, having learned that fear is the great motivator of the Great Unwashed.
And, for a party that has embraced shameless fear-mongering, paranoia, bigotry and racism as valid political tools for maintaining a “majority” through any subterfuge available, save actually convincing a majority that they have the best policy solutions, this is really just par for the course.
The course being, of course, the Devil’s Golf Course.
Death Valley: The Devil’s Golf Course
To intentionally attempt to cause panic in the reader is the ultimate betrayal of journalism. Worse, it is the worst possible approach to reporting on public health issues.
It is the EXACT moral equivalent of handing a toddler a loaded handgun and then leaving the room. (The only hope in this analogy is that no one READS you. Alas, this is not the case with this intentional and grotesque perversion of reportage.)
(The ignorant, the panicked and the GOP will manage to kill themselves and/or their neighbors if you push this primal fear into homicidal panic. And the blood will be on your sociopathic paws. )
GOOD GHOD, MAN! WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?
And listen to this insane conflation with the reverse spinning two-and-a-half Satanic Reversal:
It is precisely the intersection of Ebola and globalization that worries me. The only response to a virus this deadly is to quarantine it. Stop flights, suspend visas, and beef up customs and security. It can be done. If the FAA can cancel flights to Israel, why can’t it cancel flights to and from the West African countries whence the outbreak originated?
Simple: because doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate.
Because it is us “liberal bourgeois” who are the 1% wh0 have enriched themselves at the GOP trough at the expense of the ACTUAL petit bourgeois and middle class?
“And then we blame the poor for poverty!”
What the HELL have you been smoking, sir? How can the Party of Romney even pretend to refer to this meme with a straight face? As it stand, it ought to be laughed out of the room for the pathetically lame projection that this catamite of the plutocracy extrudes through his preferred sphincter.
Media is invaluable in spreading information about potential health threats. But it is inconceivably dangerous in spreading panic and DISinformation about same. And that is not only what this idiot at the new fake news outlet created ONLY for winning elections and policy deb(h)ates, but it is what Right wing radio hosts, and, most egregiously, Faux Nooz have been doing.
The Washington Free Beacon’s
clickbait for TODAY on the sidebar.
Let’s get this straight: abusing your position as “media” to cause fear and panic in the face of what is — by any current rational assessment — an extremely low risk of a scary viral infection is the EPITOME of irresponsible and reckless journalism.
Information helps people. Intentionally inducing panic (for no good reason other than clickbait) kills people. The former are secular saints. The latter are literal demons.
It is also the epitome of your feckless hatred of everything that is good, noble, or decent.
Matthew Continetti: Screw you.
Faux Nooz: Screw you.
If the unthinkable happens and there is an “outbreak” in the USA, I hope that you’re the first to get it.
I’ll be sure to put plastic flowers on your pauper’s grave.
Courage.
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Mr. Williams has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.