Welcome to the era of the “clipboard man.”
Remember him? If not, it’s cool: He is so Thursday.
Yet, his story illustrates why Ebola is one of those stories that can make a traditional journalist sigh.
Early Thursday, social media went all atwitter at the appearance of a news photograph showing a man in a buttoned-down shirt and black trousers on the tarmac in Dallas. He was ambling behind the hazmat-suited team escorting Amber Vinson to a plane awaiting to bring her to Emory University Hospital. Vinson is the second nurse who was infected with Ebola in the United States.
The man’s only apparent protection from the deadly disease was his clipboard.
A tweeter with the handle 22Wilson was among the astonished multitude. “So #clipboardman belongs to the utterly incompetent CDC?,” 22Wilson observed. “Shocked I tell you, shocked.”
The shock wave outpaced journalists’ capacity to explain. Eventually, a reporter determined that the man’s outfit decision was intentional. He works for Phoenix Air, the Atlanta company that specializes in transporting contagious passengers. Because folks in bio-hazard suits can’t see so well, they assign someone in street clothes to observe from a safe distance to assure everyone is following protocol.
(Reminder: You can’t get Ebola unless you come into contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is obviously sick with Ebola.)
We explained it all quite well on AJC.com. Dorrie Toney, the senior editor who directs our breaking news coverage, understands the challenge. “I tell my team all the time that they have to be quick and accurate,” she told me. “With stories like ‘clipboard guy,’ we move quickly to vet what’s already published to find the best sources we can to create an engaging, accurate and enlightening report for our audience. With that story, we wanted to add information that would put people’s concerns to rest or at least assuage their concerns.”
Yet, in the old days we would have dismissed it as a non-story. That luxury has left the building.
The Ebola story resonates for our audience with intimate power. Rightly or wrongly, people feel personally threatened by this strange and ghastly disease. A Washington Post/ABC news poll last week found that 40 percent of respondents were “very” or “somewhat worried” about the possibility that they or immediate family members might catch the virus. They believe this even though only two cases have surfaced in the United States compared to 8,400 in West Africa. And both cases in the United States involved nurses treating a man who was producing buckets of infected bodily fluids before he died. As we all know, he carried the infection from Liberia.
(Reminder: You can’t get Ebola unless you come into contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is obviously sick with Ebola.)
For a sense of proportion, between 20,000 and 30,000 Americans die from the flu each year.
Yet, we are wrenched by Ebola.
Oddly, people paying the closest attention to the news coverage don’t necessarily have a better grasp of the facts. One New Jersey poll found that people who were most closely following the Ebola story somehow had the least accurate information. David Redlawsk, who directed the Rutgers-Eagleton poll, said the media are largely responsible. “The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding,” Redlawsk told a reporter. “You just have to turn on the TV to see the hysteria of the ‘talking heads’ media. It’s really wall to wall. The crawls at the bottom of the screen are really about fear. And in all the fear and all the talking, there’s not a lot of information.”
The conventional construct was that journalists fight panic with reliable information and insight. We work very hard to maintain this standard even in an era of warp-speed news. Even so, the panic seems to be winning.
Ken White, a media consultant, captured the tricky nature of this for newsrooms in a piece he wrote for Poynter.org, a respected website for journalists. “Too much coverage, and we look like we’re being exploitative with scare tactics,” he wrote. “Too little coverage, and we get blamed for not enlightening our audience of its scope.”
Our job at the AJC is to serve you with reliable news and information. To that end, we’ve assigned some of our best folks to the story: Richard Halicks, a veteran AJC editor, is directing a team that includes Victoria Hicks, Craig Schneider, Misty Williams, Roz Bentley, Ariel Hart and Ernie Suggs. They have breathtaking experience across many fields, including public health.
Richard fully comprehends the challenge. “Ebola is incredibly scary,” he told me. “All the hype, politics and conspiracy theories aside – even when you strip away all the noise – it’s still terrifying.
“As a consequence, many of the voices you hear are shrill with panic and mistrust; others, from the government in particular, are confident to the point of arrogance,” he said. “In between those two poles is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, acting as a filter and a check on both. Our journalistic mission is neither to amplify nor attenuate the dangers of Ebola but to explain them forthrightly and dispassionately.”
(Reminder: You can’t get Ebola unless you come into contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is obviously sick with Ebola.)
