The News Minute | October 12, 2014 | 9.50 pm IST
News reports in the western media are all about the precautions people must take, quarantined people, suspected cases and the like. But the fact remains, that so far, one person has died on American soil, whereas over 3,000 people have died in Africa, largely in three countries – Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
According to a report in Mic, there is something very wrong in the way the west views the Ebola outbreak and its response to it. Despite the number of lives it has claimed in African countries, the coverage of western media has been "West-centric".
In a recent report, the website says The Ebola epidemic has killed 3,431 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; it has killed one in the United States. Liberia's Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told the U.N. Security Council in September that the disease poses a "serious threat" to the country's existence; the Obama administration recently reminded everybody that "[America's] structure would preclude an outbreak." Health care workers are threatening to strike over dissatisfaction with wages; the U.S. sent 3,000 military personnel directly into the area to help combat the epidemic. The Ebola headlines in Western media outlets, however, don't tell that story.”
The report comments on the west’s perception of the Ebola outbreak, and its response to it socially as well as by the media through data gathered from Google Analytics and also from Twitter.
But the most powerful argument on the subject is made by Lisbon-based illustrator and cartoonist Andre Carrilo, whom the article features. The image he uses to explain the travesty the western media has made of the Ebola outbreak, speaks louder than the other data put together by the report. For the image, go to Mic