Cable News Was the Major Force Behind PolitiFact’s 2014 Lie of the Year
PolitiFact has named its annual “Lie of the Year” and we have cable news to thank for helping to spread it far and wide.
Last year, President Barack Obama was responsible for the fact-checking site’s number one lie with his promise that people could keep their health insurance if they liked their plan. But this time, it was the media that really helped proliferate what the site has named the biggest falsehood of 2014: Exaggerations about Ebola.
In their essay announcing this year’s “winner,” authors Angie Drobnic Holan and Aaron Sharockman note that the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted the disease in Liberia, was one of just two Ebola-related fatalities on American soil. With winter just beginning, more than that have died of the flu. Yet, from the beginning of October for weeks later, the media — and many politicians — could talk about nothing else but Ebola panic. The editors cited claims made by Fox News pundit George Will and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) among the falsehoods put forward by prominent figures.
To demonstrate just how exaggerated the fears over Ebola in the United States were, PolitiFact looked at mentions from the three big cable news networks over the five weeks starting November 1. During that time, they found that mentions of Ebola dropped off 82% from a height of nearly 700 per week at the start of November to less than 100 at the start of December.
Meanwhile, the epidemic in West African continues to rage. But now that fear over Americans catching the disease have died down, the public does not seem to have very much interest.
If you are interested in hearing more about what’s happening on the ground in Liberia, check out On the Media’s latest podcast, which dedicated its full hour to a look at how the local press in that country is covering a definitely not exaggerated fight against Ebola.
Listen to audio below, via WNYC:
[Photo via screengrab]
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