The Curse of Yellow Journalism

 

 

There are times when you just can’t get it right, when you just can’t please anyone, let alone everyone. Arthur L.Caplan’s column in the 8/6/14 Washington Post is a perfect example of that.

 

The piece us titled, Why do Two White American’s Get the Ebola Seum While Hundreds of Africans Die?

 

When I was a kid this was called yellow journalism but now-a-days it’s just the norm; a dirty, vicious norm but still the norm. If you follow Caplan’s grimy logic and give the untested serum to 900 innocent natives and they all still die, you get accused of using, dangerous untested, potentially deadly substances on unsuspecting patients.

 

In this case the same serum, which had previously, only been tested on a couple of monkeys, was given to two white doctors who were knowledgeable enough to understand the dangerous circumstances and who despite their whiteness, were in the Congo to try to help the predominantly poor black people who lived there.

 

After establishing his premise, that these two doctors only got this drug because of some kind of prejudice or social injustice, Caplan goes on to explain at length the real reasons; medical, legal and logistic why they were the ones to get the drug. In doing this he refutes his own headline, but everyone who reads or writes newspapers knows that the headline and subsequent first paragraph are all that most people read anyway, especially when things get technical, as this article does and more especially when it’s as badly written as Caplan’s.

 

Once he’s made his technical apologia, Caplan can’t resist going back to the kind of phony liberal argument that makes those of us who tend to lean left, sick. By doing this he gives mountains of fodder to the out of control, Right. He starts babbling about the reality that poor people never get the drugs first. Of course not, poor people never get anything first except sickness and hunger, it’s the penalty for being poor. It’s called the human condition and no matter how hard we try to balance it we will never be able to change it completely. That doesn’t make it right, it just makes it real. Whining about it won’t help. Fighting for government research, rather than allowing all research to be done by private corporations will help.

 

Caplan is just fair enough to explain to those who need to be led by the nose that the drug companies hold back on allowing experimental drugs to be used by anyone because they fear failure of the drug which could cut into their research allocations or even invite legal action by the same kind of ambulance chasing scum that have placed the legal profession in competition with the insurance industry for the lowest rung on the sub-human ladder.

 

What never comes up in the article, is that these two professionals had given up their lives and separated from their families, to go to Africa and help the people there through this plague. If anyone deserved to be the first to be helped it was them. If the greater good could be served by helping anyone, it was them. It is also because of their background that they completely understood what they were being given. This would not be true of just any patient Ignorance abounds in situations like this. Just look at the way that the local West African governments have handled the whole mess. Instead of informing the public of the progress of the disease and giving them the information that they would need to help avert it, they muzzled the press and kept the parameters of the contagion a secret until it was so bad that it could no longer be contained.

 

There is no cure for ignorance and it knows no borders. Here in the US where there is, so far, no Ebola at all, ignorant, self serving people spread lies and misinformation, sometimes just because they’re stupid and sometimes because it suits their political or profit making purposes. An idiotic Georgia legislator who also claims to be a doctor comes immediately to mind. This clown gives interviews in airports in which he claims that the child refugees coming here from Central America are bringing Ebola. Either he doesn’t know where Africa is or he thinks Honduras is right next to Nigeria.

 

In any case it’s time everyone holstered their weapons, suppressed their unreasonable fears and started acting like accountable grownups. One of the ways to do that is to eschew the kind of yellow journalism that dribbles from Mr. Caplan’s computer.

 

And speaking of yellow journalism, Sean Gregory’s story in Time this week is a prime example of just what it looks like. In it Gregory recounts the story, almost a year old, of the death of Chad Stover, a high school football player from Tipton, MO. It’s a very sad story, heartbreaking in fact, but its relevance was last year. Gregory was able to gin up interest in the story only because of the huge media blast over the pro’s personal misbehavior on the current scene. It’s only relevance to that is that it is also about football. No one misbehaved the way the pro’s in the headlines have. It simply recounts the tragic death of a young man.

 

But what’s the point? Yes football is dangerous. So, in fact, are almost all sports, so is crossing the street, but do you want to envision a world without sport? Gregory’s only point is that this subject matter is in the current headlines and it enables him to sell a story, just like it enables Time to sell Mazdas on their back cover. Disgusting.