Ebola mentions in US online media: warranted coverage?

While the largest epidemic of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in history is currently spreading through three West African countries, here in North America we’ve seen 4 cases—only one leading to unfortunate death. Yet, the amount of online news items uncovered by MediaMiser would lead you to believe we’re in the midst of our own epidemic—perhaps one of a different nature: disease sensationalism.

Curious as to how more prolific diseases stacked up against the Ebola coverage, we ran a media analysis on the top 6 deadly diseases plaguing North America today and compared them to the staggering number of media mentions Ebola has received in the US online news between September 1 and October 31, 2014.

Here’s what we discovered: 

Agility PR Solutions

Agility PR Solutions provides powerful, yet easy to use media database, monitoring, and analytics solutions for tomorrow’s communicators. Since 2003, clients have trusted our tools and services to help them identify and connect with influencers, capture coverage, and measure impact of everything they do. Whether we do it for you or help you do it yourself, our team of media experts make it easy to monitor and measure traditional, broadcast, social and online coverage.