Ebola virus kills the other, but anytime It may land here : media coverage of an African plague

This chapter investigates how European media and their public make sense of Ebola and how the newest African plague is constructed and deconstructed as a threat to modern ‘risk societies’. Discourse analysis of media reports are combined with the results of group interviews conducted to show how people living in different European countries (Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey) respond to the media coverage of a newly emerging disease: for months, this was framed as the African plague, until the virus landed in Madrid, on August 8, 2014, in the body of a Spanish missionary who was the first European victim of Ebola. Before that the epidemic had been lurking ‘out there’ in the ‘heart of darkness’ remaining the Other’s disease. Then, the doomsday virus cradled in the dark continent hit the headlines in Europe and the US, producing a media frenzy. Content analysis of European broadsheets, tabloids and weeklies reveals the most prominent features of the rhetoric of fear that dominated media reports in the summer of 2014. Readers were confronted with the narrative of a medical thriller beginning with What if speculation and concluding with doomsday scenarios often heralded by the conjunction but, which allowed facts to be replaced with conjecture often fuelled by horrifying comparisons and metaphors of a killer virus. In 2014, the media brought Ebola to our living rooms and our minds. This chapter examines othering as a tool used by the media. It demonstrates how otherness works as a defence strategy helping to redirect the threat and thus allay the fears aroused by graphic stories. Furthermore, it shows how effective that strategy can be when humans want to deny their vulnerability