Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 108

reporting the nearly irrefutable aforementioned scientific facts about Ebola and reassuring the public, American journalists have made a concerted effort to manufacture ambivalence. Interjecting doubt where there is none to be found from a scientific perspective, the American media has crafted a hyper-real narrative that more closely resembles a cinematic script than a faithful representation of reality. Corianne Egan explains that media coverage of this (non)event is like a “big-budget Hollywood” production that is completely divorced from reality (40). The intentional barrage of misinformation on major news outlets gives viewers the impression that Ebola is lurking around every corner. As opposed to representing the threat of Ebola (or the lack thereof) in a realistic fashion, the alleged “watchdogs” have created their own version of reality that is merely a figment of their imagination when compared to actual evidence. Unfortunately, in Baudrillardian terms, these simulacra have replaced reality to such an alarming extent that the real appears to be on the verge of collapsing entirely. Gregg Gonsalves, Peter Staley, and Jeffrey Kluger underscore that the Ebola scare is not the first questionable viral threat that has been blown out of proportion by the media to the point of becoming a cinematic work of fiction. Reminding the reader how the media concocted a frightening story line related to HIV-AIDS in the 1980s which was not supported by scientific inquiry, Gonsalves and Staley lament, “The toxic mix of scientific ignorance and paranoia on display in the reaction to the return of the health care workers from the front lines of the fight against Ebola in West Africa, the amplification of these reactions by politicians and the media, and the fear-driven suspicion and shunning of whole classes of people are all reminiscent of the response to the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s" (1). As Gonsalves and Staley note, the AIDS panic of the 1980s is an example of how the media skillfully distorts or misrepresents reality in order to create a more interesting narrative when scientific facts are rather banal and need to be embellished. People who were alive in the 1980s vividly recall images of individuals refusing to use public restrooms due to the fear of AIDS contamination. Indeed, the parallels between the media’s (mis-)representation of the dangers of being exposed to AIDS and Ebola are quite striking. In both instances, journalists framed these issues in a certain fashion to obfuscate scientific data which indicated that very few people were at risk at all in the United States. Deriving inspiration from Philip Alcabes’s book Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics From the Black Plague to Avian Flu, Kluger asserts that SARS and swine-flu are two other salient examples from recent history which illustrate that the 104