The making of ebola... Medialne narracje o epidemii w Zachodniej Afryce

Abstrakt

THE MAKING OF EBOLA... MEDIA NARRATIVES ABOUT THE EPIDEMIC IN WEST AFRICA

The article focuses on Western media narratives about the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. The author analyzes selected media texts to show the way in which Africa is represented as a land doomed to poverty and as “a reservoir of the virus.” She also shows that the Western media providing the information on the epidemic often omitted social, political and economic factors from which the epidemic originated. Instead they emphasized local customs (burial rituals, eating wild animals’ meat, magical rituals) as the most significant risk factors. Not mentioning the lack of medical infrastructure or the poverty in the affected countries, which was caused by a particular geopolitical situation, made the Ebola epidemic seem a natural phenomenon that could not have been avoided.