There’s an arguably more serious pandemic in the United States and it’s reached new depths of awfulness and depravity. It’s not a virus, but it might as well be. To quote Jon Stewart, it’s hurting America and, specifically, inciting unnecessary panic.
This is, of course, the news media’s handling of the Ebola story, in which every human with a spiffy anchorman haircut, from Fox News to MSNBC to CNN to the network morning shows, is frantically delivering the most shamefully unforgivable abortion of journalistic integrity in recent memory. It’s not unlike the familiar behavior of local news anchors just before a light dusting of snow, screaming, “Snowpocalypse! We’re all doomed! Bread, milk, toilet paper! Go! NOW!” — but amplified by a factor of “you will personally eject blood from your anus and eye sockets! RUUUUUN!”
A few years ago, insufferable media bore Mark Halperin told us that the far-right old-school-HTML tabloid jockey Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report, “rules our world.” Not hearing anything recently to contradict such a claim, we can safely assume that Drudge continues to maintain some clout with the Old Media cocktail circuit, and if so, perhaps Drudge’s website could be (ahem) patient zero in this wildly exaggerated level of panic-mongering in the news media. Here’s just a sampling of the apocalyptic top story headlines from Drudge late last week… CONTINUE READING