That there is a sensationalistic dimension to the Ebola coverage is something of which I have no doubt.<\/p>\n
Sensationalizing events is what the media does best. There may even be a sense in which it can be said that sensationalism is intrinsic <\/em>to mass media.\u00a0 Sensationalism serves the interests of two groups of people: media personalities and the politicians with whom they collude.<\/p>\n Both the reputations and wallets of media figures are likely to inflate as long as they continue creating <\/em>\u201cnews\u201d that arrests the attention of citizens who find it increasingly difficult to attend to anything for very long.\u00a0 And the politicians on whose behalf journalists and commentators advocate (in one way or another) are well served by the manufacturing of \u201ccrises.\u201d\u00a0 This, to be sure, is a bi-partisan phenomenon: Virtually every politician\u2014particularly at the national level\u2014agrees wholeheartedly with Rahm Emmanuel\u2019s belief that a \u201cgood crisis\u201d is something that must never be permitted to \u201cgo to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n This being said, the fact remains that no more than a month or so ago, President Obama declared with all of the assuredness with which he prefaces all of his errors, that Ebola had basically no chance of making its way to American shores. And now that Obama has been proven wrong once more\u2014and with such neck-breaking speed!\u2014he not only refuses to concede having stuck his foot in his mouth; he has dug in more deeply, refusing to appropriate the most elementary measures, like a travel ban vis-\u00e0-vis such Ebola-ridden \u201chot zones\u201d as Liberia, to protect Americans from this deadly disease.<\/p>\n There are reasons for this, ideological<\/em> reasons, that shouldn\u2019t be lost upon us.\u00a0 Yet lest we misunderstand, it must be noted that the ideology supplying the conceptual lenses through which Obama and his fellow partisans view this phenomenon (and every other) is, to a not insignificant extent, shared by many of his Republican opponents.<\/p>\n For the sake of simplicity, we can call it \u201cPolitical Correctness\u201d (PC).<\/p>\n That\u2019s right: for all of their bellyaching against PC, GOP politicians and their mouthpieces in much of the so-called \u201cconservative\u201d media have imbibed hook, line, and sinker this leftist claptrap.<\/p>\n First, Ebola originates in Africa. <\/em>Thus, a travel ban would adversely impact blacks <\/em>who desire a better life in America.\u00a0 But for a (still) predominantly white country, especially a superpower like the United States, to do anything, <\/em>for any<\/em> reason, that could be so much as remotely construed as harming blacks sounds suspiciously like \u201cracism.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond this, courtesy of the pernicious (to say nothing of idiotic) doctrine of \u201cdisparate impact\u201d that, in one way or another, has long been exploited by \u201cliberals,\u201d \u201cconservatives,\u201d and <\/em>\u201clibertarians\u201d for ideological and political purposes, the very fact that there is an \u201cunequal\u201d distribution of Ebola among Americans and Africans, whites and blacks, may be read as implicating white Americans <\/em>as the actual culprits!<\/p>\n And if we denied just <\/em>these poor, disease-ridden Africans entry into America, wouldn\u2019t we be guilty of engaging in the \u201cracist\u201d practice of \u201cprofiling<\/em>?\u201d \u00a0Or, what\u2019s infinitely worst, wouldn\u2019t we be guilty of \u201csegregating<\/em>\u201d ourselves off from these people of color?\u00a0 Why, from this vantage point, the imposition of a travel ban would make Bull Connors<\/em> of us all!<\/p>\n Secondly, to restrict immigration in this respect <\/em>is to imply that we could <\/em>restrict it in all respects. <\/em>In other words, something like a travel ban on flights from West Africa speaks not just to the issue of \u201cracism\u201d toward blacks, but to the issue of immigration as well.<\/p>\n Of course, considering that the overwhelming majority of immigrants that has been flooding the country since the middle of the 1960\u2019s consist of non-whites from the Third World, immigration has become a race-related issue. Yet it is precisely because of this fact that it is enthusiastically welcomed by those\u2014like our esteemed President\u2014who regard America\u2019s historical white majority as a cause for lamentation.<\/p>\n The absolute last thing that immigration enthusiasts want to do is to show Americans that immigration can <\/em>be halted.<\/p>\n Make no mistakes: the PC Zeitgeist <\/em>regarding \u201cracism\u201d and immigration compose the paradigm through which the Ebola \u201ccrisis\u201d is being approached.<\/p>\n But there is another prevalent idea that also serves to impede our efforts to deal sensibly with Ebola carriers from the Dark Continent.<\/p>\n This is the idea that America is not <\/em>a historical<\/em> country, but, well, an idea, <\/em>a universal <\/em>concept or ideal.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the problem: ideas do not\u2014because they cannot<\/em>\u2014have borders. <\/em><\/p>\n An idea is an immaterial or incorporeal entity, and as the Christian philosopher Boethius once noted, it is self-evident that \u201cincorporeal things cannot exist in a place.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n If America is an idea, then Americans are citizens of the world. This in turn means that all of the world\u2019s citizens who affirm \u201cthe idea\u201d that is America are <\/em>Americans.<\/p>\n Borders, then, to say nothing of\u2014horror of horrors!\u2014bans, <\/em>are egregious.<\/p>\n As we watch the national debate over the topic of Ebola unfold, we should bear in mind that the forgoing constitutes the framework within which it transpires\u2014even if no one will admit, or maybe even notice, it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That there is a sensationalistic dimension to the Ebola coverage is something of which I have no doubt. Sensationalizing events is what the media does best. There may even be a sense in which it can be said that sensationalism is intrinsic to mass media.\u00a0 Sensationalism serves the interests of two groups of people: media…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n