“Health officials struggle to control the media narrative about Ebola,” read a headline in the Washington, D.C., publication The Hill a few days ago. The words were atop an article arguing that careful Obama administration pronouncements about the limited threat posed to most Americans by Ebola were being drowned out by “wall-to-wall coverage of Ebola” on cable news networks.
No kidding. This is partly because those networks have recently come to believe, with research to back them, that the biggest ratings are produced not by recapping headlines every few minutes (their past practice) but by focusing on one or two huge stories with legs.
This approach to doing business predisposes those networks to try to feed the beast and keep the story going: a new case of Ebola here, a suspicion there, a possible outbreak in your town. It is easy to get caught up in the narrative, which gets better, and thus more involving, the worse the facts get in actuality. (It dies as new cases dry up.)
That shift in emphasis has significant ethical implications: Does constant coverage not imply panic-level importance and thus confer danger? If a story about a virus needs to be kept alive, does that not inevitably infect the story?
Those matters are, for sure, worthy of fuller discussion in those cable newsrooms. For in the case of the Ebola narrative, we think we know how this story plays out. It’s just that we are confusing fact and fiction.
Inarguably, the storyline we think we know — a viral narrative — has been affecting a great deal of what we have been thinking and feeling about this terrifying global crisis over the past few weeks. We’ve read “The Hot Zone,” the 1994 work by Richard Preston that was billed as nonfiction but structured like a thriller. We’ve maybe seen the 1995 movie “Outbreak,” which was about a fictional but Ebola-like virus called Motaba, or perhaps “Contagion,” the 2011 Steven Soderbergh thriller (partly filmed in Chicago and Evanston) that explored in tense, terrifying detail the ease with which a stealthy virus like Ebola can travel across our interconnected planet.
Some of us maybe read the seminal account of the early spread of HIV, as described in the late Randy Shilts’ monumental work of narrative journalism, “And the Band Played On,” which recounted the role in the AIDS epidemic of Gaeten Dugas, a flight attendant whom Shilts assigns the role of Patient Zero, the Typhoid Mary of AIDS. Shilts was writing nonfiction, but he was a masterful storyteller just the same.
In “Contagion,” which was pure fiction starring Gwyneth Paltrow but was no less terrifying for that, the virus functioned as a worthy antagonist — hiding, shape-shifting, destroying and, above all, constantly building and sending out tentacles into new worlds.
We might think only a fool would confuse such a movie with reality or news, but the world has become so complex — the competing data sets that we find on our computers so tricky to dissect and intuit — we rely more and more on stories as a means of basic comprehension, especially in crisis.
Film director Griffin Dunne has a new documentary in the works (currently raising money through Kickstarter) about the writer Joan Didion, which puts that thought very succinctly in its title — drawn from an actual Didion quotation: “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.”
Or, one might add, to find out how we might die.
In her book “Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative,” Priscilla Wald articulated the basic plot of an outbreak narrative. (Her work was recently featured on the public radio program “On the Media.”) To paraphrase, it begins in a remote jungle, typically an African jungle, and features a new and devastating disease that attacks some central function of the body. From there, the virus, which threatens human existence, moves quickly to the planet’s major cities. In these narratives, the virus almost always begins in the Third World, but the solution almost always is found in the United States.
In the nick of time, a cure is found and the apocalypse is averted.
Watch some of the coverage of the current, very real Ebola crisis, and you’d swear the cable networks are following that fictional playbook, amping up the tension with every suspected case and playing into our expectations of constant intensification.
As Wald noted in an “On the Media” interview, this kind of storytelling comes with collateral damage: the stigmatization of people from Africa, the economic losses and social trauma that can flow from mass panic, the keeping of kids out of school, the propagation of a mindset that can cause people unwittingly to make everything worse — such as hiding sickness from the authorities at the airport. Wald also argues that the “outbreak narrative” does harm by focusing us all on containment of the immediate problem, rather than focusing on the root causes for these viral outbreaks, such as poverty, inadequate health care, lousy infrastructure and other problems that might prevent the next outbreak narrative from breaking out in the first place.
To put all this another way, the linking of Ebola to these viral stories etched so deeply within our consciousness actually does real harm. We are not living through “The Hot Zone” or “Outbreak” or “Contagion.” We’re living through one of many real-life health crises. These real-life stories do not start with the beginning of an outbreak. They start with the causes.
And there is no pre-scripted heroic ending that already has been filmed, timed to broadcast just when the virus seems to have won. On the contrary. In life, the end of the story is unknown.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
