Note to the media: There is no Ebola "hysteria"

Much of that misinformation has in fact been spewed by the very same public-health officials the paper credits with working to “quell public worries.” The fake Ebola panic is of a piece with the outbreak of Islamophobia and mob attacks against Arabs that failed to transpire, despite dire warnings from government and media, after 9/11. The same horror of the proletariat informed the ghastly misreporting of alleged civil mayhem in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “The assumption that the public will panic . . . has been taken for granted in media and public policy discourses and is now even reflected in discussions among public health, homeland security, and emergency management professionals,” the authors of a 2006 study of misreporting on crime in the Superdome wrote in Annals of the American Academy. “These discourses often conflate the concept of panic with entirely normal and understandable public responses to risk and uncertainty, such as the upsurge of public information seeking in the 2001 anthrax attack.”

This can be restated in non-academic language. The American people do not get hysterical for the same reason that the one time you never see a road accident is when a power outage takes out all the traffic lights. It is in the nature of citizens of a free and market-based society to be cooperative and rational. One day there will be another panic about Ebola or some other ailment. The same establishment experts will fume about the risk of public hysteria and fret over the burden of managing information in ways that do not cause panic in the streets. And again, the public will not panic, because it’s the experts you have to worry about.