“A new poll last week revealed disturbing trends about the increasingly dire media coverage of the Ebola story in the United States. Measuring the rising anxiety among news consumers, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll of New Jersey residents found that 69 percent are at least somewhat concerned about the deadly disease spreading in the U.S.

The truly strange finding was that people who said they were following the story most closely were the ones with the most inaccurate information about Ebola. The more information they consumed about the dangerous disease, the less they knew about it. How is that even possible?

Poll director David Redlawsk cast an eye of blame on the news media. “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 Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

*Read more here from Eric Boehlert / Media Matters In America
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/10/15/ebola-coverage-the-more-you-watch-the-less-you/201161