Rieder: Can news media meet the Ebola challenge?

It's clear that the Ebola story is not going away anytime soon. That presents the news media with a serious challenge — and a major opportunity.

Ebola has all the elements that can bring out journalism's worst instincts, and in some cases already has, with cable being a prime offender. And it can be a social media nightmare as misinformation ricochets through the Twitterverse.

That's particularly true with Ebola not just in faraway Africa, where it has done such serious damage, but also in the United States, where last Thursday it made its well-chronicled debut in New York City.

That the Ebola story is a big deal is unarguable. The Ebola outbreak has infected more than 10,000 people and has killed nearly 5,000 so far. It has a mortality rate of 70%, according to the World Health Organization.

And as the disease spread to the USA, some blithe reassurances have quickly unraveled. The performance of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas hardly helped calm the nerves. It clearly wasn't ready to deal with the first Ebola patient in the United States, Thomas Eric Duncan, who had contracted the disease in Liberia. Two of the nurses treating him caught the disease.

So Ebola is a huge international story, and its arrival here demands intense coverage. But not too intense. The challenge is keep some perspective, to inform without panicking the populace.

Four cases — three of them involving health care workers who have had close contact with Ebola patients — is hardly an epidemic. And the disease, while deadly once you get it, is not spread through the air, only via bodily fluids. So it's pretty hard to get.

That leads to a big-time journalistic juggling act, one in which it is all too easy to drop the balls.

And cable, off course, has dropped plenty of them. Witness the devastating collage of Hysteria TV put together by Jon Stewart earlier this month. The breathless, alarmist reports, many from CNN and Fox, are the antithesis of what responsible journalists should be doing.

As was the ludicrous effort by CNN's Ashleigh Banfield to hammer the notion that Ebola is the ISIS of biological agents and raise the specter of suicide attackers brandishing Ebola.

But you don't have to go to such theater of the absurd lengths to do damage. The very fact of wall-to-wall coverage communicates the idea that the end is nigh, even if the coverage is peppered with the appropriate disclaimers. I was struck by that while watching CNN last Friday, the day after New York physician Craig Spencer had been diagnosed with the disease. When something is endlessly on the screen, to the exclusion everything else going on in the world, it gives the strong impression that we are engulfed in crisis.

Yes, it's a big story. But not one so overarching at this stage that it must monopolize the news.

This month Lara Setrakian, the founder of the immersive website Syria Deeply, launched Ebola Deeply, a one-stop venue for news about the deadly disease. I asked Setrakian for some of her thoughts on how the media should approach the story. The key, she says, is context.

"We need to maintain a sense of balance and proportionality," she says. "It's important to avoid an overemphasis on one-off cases at the expense of the bigger story."

That "bigger story," of course, is Ebola in Africa, where the disease has claimed so many. For months Ebola wasn't a dominant story in the U.S. even while Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia were ravaged. But when two Americans in Liberia came down with the disease in late July, the American media took notice. The outbreak "started in Africa and will end in Africa," Setrakian says.

Despite the missteps, Setrakian sees great opportunity for the media to help sort things out. "There's no better time for journalism as sense-making," she says.

And, she adds pointedly, "Media coverage has to be responsible when the stakes are this high."