Representing Ebola by Hasian Marouf A. Jr.;

Author:Hasian, Marouf A., Jr.; [Hasian, Marouf A. Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Anticipating the Ebola Apocalypse and American Mediascapes

Government authorities, public health officials, and journalists who talk and write about the spread of infectious diseases have a difficult time drawing that mythic line that is supposed to exist between providing citizens with adequate warnings and creating moral panic.1 As Laurie Garrett would write in February of 2015, it seems as though “humans always overreact” during disease outbreaks because they each have “social and political ramifications that go far beyond anything that sound reasonable” as we try to handle “the interaction of our species with a particular set of microbes.”2 The stories that are still told about the U.S. governmental response to the outbreak of “Spanish flu” in 1918, for example, remind us that responsible social agents sometimes made the mistake of not sounding needed alarms. Critics of American policies during that period later complained that the public had not been adequately warned before bodies started piling up during a global pandemic that killed millions.3

At other times governmental officials, and members of the media, don’t err on the side of caution, and instead of allaying fears they anger communities when they are accused of hyping threats, such as the infamous 1976 swine flu “debacle.”4 All of this becomes incredibly complicated in public health contexts when so many stakeholders—pharmaceutical companies, government officials, public health employees, doctors, nurses, and others—become participants in cultural and legal debates about what to do in “emerging” infectious disease contexts.

This particular chapter draws from the work of Arjun Appadurai and his discussion of “global cultural” flows like “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes” so that I can put on display the ways that films, popular books, and media displays circulate Ebola dispositifs that reflected and refracted what American audiences wanted to see and wanted to hear about disease prevention and containment.5 While many mass media scholars are surely right to point out that the media uses particular epistemic or axiological “frames” to help set the agenda during salient controversies, they often do so in ways that are circumscribed and informed by audience expectations.

Journalists and other social agents involved in the production of mediascapes co-produce these Ebola rhetorics, and they do so in dynamic and recursive ways. For example, both media outlets and public audiences are involved in the decisions that are made to grant, or to withhold, scientific legitimacy in public health contexts. They get to decide who are the contending, and the pretending, “Ebola experts.” These decisions, in turn, impact the ways that communities view clarion calls that a particular event constitutes a “crisis,” as well as the ways that populations evaluate potential solutions to perceived crises. Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff recently commented on how both the manufacturing of crisis, as well the production of solutions, were all parts of what they called a “vital systems security” diagram “of power.”6

The heuristic value of applying some of Appadurai’s conceptual apparatus in studies of global exchange of information, epistemes, and other figurations for critical cultural scholars comes from the ways that

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