Study: Americans who are closely following the Ebola news coverage are actually the most uninformed

[Cali_Democrat]

ERIC BOEHLERT
The Media's Ebola Coverage: The More You Watch, The Less You Know?


A new poll last week revealed disturbing trends about the increasingly dire media coverage of the Ebola story in the United States. Measuring the rising anxiety among news consumers, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll of New Jersey residents found that 69 percent are at least somewhat concerned about the deadly disease spreading in the U.S.

The truly strange finding was that people who said they were following the story most closely were the ones with the most inaccurate information about Ebola. The more information they consumed about the dangerous disease, the less they knew about it. How is that even possible?

Poll director David Redlawsk cast an eye of blame on the news media. "The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding," Redlawsk told a reporter. "You just have to turn on the TV to see the hysteria of the "talking heads" media. It's really wall to wall. The crawls at the bottom of the screen are really about fear. And in all the fear and all the talking, there's not a lot of information."

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/10/15/ebola-coverage-the-more-you-watch-the-less-you/201161

[Fred Sanders]

1. This is purposeful misinformation by the fear mongering media, it is criminal...

[Cali_Democrat]

2. from the article:

CNN actually invited onto the network a fiction writer who wrote an Ebola thriller in the 1980s to hype unsubstantiated fears about the transmission of the virus. CNN's Ashleigh Banfield speculated that "All ISIS would need to do is send a few of its suicide killers into an Ebola-affected zones and then get them on some mass transit, somewhere where they would need to be to affect the most damage."

[Fumesucker]

10. Odd, they didn't show the waste "piled to the ceiling" in the first picture

[Fred Sanders]

11. You missed the point....the first picture is not the actual room of ONE Ebola patient.

[Fumesucker]

12. Sort of like that recent ad about "Republicans are people too", eh?

Where they used stock photos of just any old people.

[JI7]

3. if it's TV coverage , yes

[The Magistrate]

4. I Wish I Could Say I Was Surprised, Sir, But I Am Not

"Surely nothing will go wrong, and almost certainly not immediately."

[customerserviceguy]

5. Please consider the fact

that a fairly large percentage of the population of New Jersey lives within an hour's radius of NYC, and people do a lot of travelling within that state, so it wouldn't be long before a case that was missed by a quickie temperature scan became threatening to a fairly large number of people, both in and out of NJ. Many people in NJ have encountered travellers from Africa, so they know that it's possible to be in the near proximity of someone who is infected.

Ask the same question in Montana, and you'll probably get a different result.

Also, a sizable part of the population there doesn't trust government in general, and politicians in particular. I speak with dozens each day, and the distrust of government experts is something mentioned every so often. We know that we were lied to by the NSA with spying on our phone calls, I don't blame anyone for feeling skeptical about what we are being told officially.

[Hortensis]

6. Other well-known real facts are that fright moves people right and that it's election time...

[customerserviceguy]

7. Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking

The Repukes couldn't possibly have planned a better October surprise. Had the President insisted on a world travel quarantine for those coming out of West Africa the minute we knew that Duncan had the disease, it would have gone a lot better for the election.

[Cali_Democrat]

8. LOL!

Thanks Obama!

[Hestia]

9. I think everything was basically okay until the nurse who treated the ebola patient in Dallas came

down with a fever (after no training we find out) gets on a plane. We've also been told that everything is okay until the fever - then you are throwing off virals (I think it is called?). Now, I'm a smidge worried because my DH has to travel next week via airplane. It's the idiots who know they are sick running around infecting everyone. That's how a problem starts...

[Demeter]

13. Please consider the OTHER Fact

that lately, the people who are screaming DANGER (Snowden and Manning supporters, economy alarmists, pro-choice activists, and the like)

turn out to be COMPLETELY RIGHT and VINDICATED by later events.

So, NO SALE on the premise that the people who are most interested in the topic are the least informed.

That is probably the most bogus Newspeak example of the decade! Congratulations!