{"id":409,"date":"2014-10-22T11:46:05","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T11:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=409"},"modified":"2014-10-22T11:46:05","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T11:46:05","slug":"tomgram-karen-greenberg-will-the-u-s-go-to-war-against-ebola-tomdispatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=409","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Will the U.S. Go to “War” Against Ebola? | TomDispatch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Will the U.S. Go to “War” Against Ebola? | TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, if you want to catch the essence of a moment, however, grim, you need to turn tohumor<\/a>. Recently, the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s resident satirist Andy Borowitz\u00a0produced<\/a>\u00a0one of his patented fake news stories that began this way: \u201cThe president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, attempted on Wednesday to defuse the brewing controversy over his decision to change the network\u2019s official slogan from \u2018The Most Trusted Name in News\u2019 to \u2018Holy Crap, We\u2019re All Gonna Die.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Can there be any question that a pandemic disease, which may, by December, be spreading at the rate of\u00a010,000 cases<\/a>\u00a0per week in West Africa and, in a deeply interconnected world, can head anywhere is worthy of attention, preparation, and planning?\u00a0 Can there be any question that a major global humanitarian effort to stem Ebola\u2019s course in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea is imperative? Still, you have to wonder whether the second-by-second coverage of the two cases so far transmitted in this country, including the\u00a0quarantining of a dog<\/a>, isn’t just the usual media overkill.\u00a0 It\u2019s a story that, like massive storms and extreme weather, has so many upsides for a media world that feels itself up against the wall: it\u2019s easy to write (or film); there\u2019s no need for \u201cbalance\u201d; it\u2019s guaranteed to instantly glue eyeballs at a time when your audience can be elsewhere in no-seconds flat; and it breeds overreaction and the sort of\u00a0hysteria<\/a>\u00a0that brings in yet larger audiences, the sort that Borowitz captured so well.\u00a0 On the other hand, it makes reality almost impossible to grasp by denying context or perspective.\u00a0 Think of Ebola as the disease version of ISIS beheading videos.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Will the U.S. Go to “War” Against Ebola? | TomDispatch. Sometimes, if you want to catch the essence of a moment, however, grim, you need to turn tohumor. Recently, the\u00a0New Yorker\u2019s resident satirist Andy Borowitz\u00a0produced\u00a0one of his patented fake news stories that began this way: \u201cThe president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[223,253,259,446,607,834,862],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-geopolitics","tag-ebola","tag-elections","tag-empire","tag-isis","tag-pandemic","tag-us","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}