Twelve of the African journalists who were turned away from USFSP because of Ebola concerns will be coming to St. Petersburg after all.
They will be just down the street at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies on Oct. 31-Nov. 4.
“Poynter has a long history and tradition of inclusion, it has a long history of training journalists, both here and abroad, and I think in that spirit, it’s something we can and should do at Poynter,” institute president Tim Franklin said in a statement last week.
The institute, a nonprofit school for journalists at 801 Third St. S, owns the Tampa Bay Times. It had been on the original schedule to host a half-day session with the journalists. Now, it will coordinate the entire program.
Two of the 14 African journalists originally scheduled to come to St. Petersburg will be absent. They live in Sierra Leone and Liberia, two of the West African countries hardest hit by the Ebola virus, and the U.S. State Department decided to delay their visit.
“We anticipate offering these distinguished journalists exchange program opportunities in the future,” State Department spokesman Nathan Arnold wrote in an email to The Crow’s Nest.
The State Department and several journalism schools around the country are public-private partners in the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists, which brings a hundred foreign journalists to the U.S. each year to examine journalistic principles and practices here. This would have been USFSP’s fifth year as a host and participant.
The university announced Oct. 17 that it was canceling this year’s program “out of upmost caution” and because some faculty, staff and students shared widespread national concerns that the epidemic in West Africa might spread throughout the United States.
Six days later, Dr. Han Reichgelt, the regional vice-chancellor for academic affairs, said in an interview with The Crow’s Nest that the reaction on campus has been generally positive and the limited emails he has gotten “run 4 to 1 with the decision we made.” The university administration has had no second thoughts despite some pointed criticism and Poynter’s decision to do what USFSP ruled out, he said.
“There have been some discussions, but the timeline was very clear,” Reichgelt said. “Around the 15th or 16th, Dr. (Deni) Elliott (chair of the journalism department) got some emails from faculty and staff that they were concerned to be involved in the program with the Murrow journalists and the fact that two of the journalists came from Ebola-infected countries.”
Elliott asked the State Department “if they would consider disinviting the journalists from the infected countries; they said no,” Reichgelt said.
It was only after the university’s decision to cancel that the State Department reversed itself and removed the journalists from Sierra Leone and Liberia from the list of participants.
At that point, Reichgelt said, it was too late. “No matter what I think about Ebola or the State Department’s decision, we didn’t have time to educate or change people’s minds on it,” he said.
Only one person has died from Ebola in the United States – a visitor from Liberia who passed away Oct. 8. But when two of the nurses who had cared for him at a Dallas hospital contracted the virus, national concern ballooned into fear that some journalists have dubbed “Fearbola” and “Ebolanoia.”
Fear of the disease, which has infected more than 10,000 people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and killed nearly 5,000, temporarily marooned a cruise ship outside a Caribbean port. Parents pulled their children out of a Mississippi school when they heard the principal had been to Zambia, an African country untouched by the disease. A teacher in Maine was put on 21-day paid leave because of fears she had been exposed to Ebola during a trip to Dallas for a conference. And Navarro College, a community college in Texas, has stopped accepting applications from any country in Africa, according to the website Inside Higher Ed.
Meanwhile, the University of Georgia rescinded a speaking invitation to a Liberian editor. Syracuse University canceled a workshop by a Washington Post photographer who had covered the Ebola epidemic in Liberia. Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland disinvited the chief health editor for ABC News, Dr. Richard Besser.
Besser, who served as acting director for the federal Centers for Disease and Prevention during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak and was in West Africa in late September, said the university asked him to make his presentation via Skype instead. But he declined, writing in the Washington Post that he did not want “to feed the idea that anyone who has been to West Africa, even if not sick, poses a risk.”
The cancellations by USFSP, Georgia and Syracuse have been roundly criticized by some. One critic is Andrew Beaujon, a senior online reporter who covers the news media for Poynter.
“‘Fearbola’ has no place at journalism schools. There’s simply too much well-reported information to justify these jelly-spined responses,” he wrote on Oct. 20. Administrators at the three universities “are teaching their students a dismal lesson: If they fear criticism – or possibly lawsuits – they should back off, facts be damned.”
However, an informal survey of USFSP journalism students last week suggests that many support the administration’s decision to cancel the program. Five professors who discussed the issue with students told The Crow’s Nest that student sentiment seemed to favor the administration. A couple of students said they might be comfortable mingling with the African journalists, but they thought their parents would object.
American press coverage of Ebola has been criticized, too.
In an editorial last week, the New England Journal of Medicine blistered the news media, which it said has “generated too much hype, been indiscriminately critical of our public health officials, and been guilty of fear mongering.”
National coverage has been “disgraceful in many respects,” said Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, in remarks in Boston on Oct. 20. “I have to roll my eyes when, like today, I’m reading all these stories about ‘the panic.’ Well, who helped cause the panic? I mean, please!”
Dr. Douglas Holt, director of the Division of Infectious Disease and Internal Medicine at USF Health, said in a lecture Thursday that Ebola, though deadly, is not as contagious as many people imagine.
A person has to be in close contact with someone who is already very ill – with bleeding, vomiting or diarrhea – to catch Ebola, Holt told doctors, nurses and medical staff in a USF Health auditorium.
“If it is as contagious as people imagine, we would have a much bigger problem right now,” said Holt, who is also director of the Hillsborough County Health Department. “Ebola is like a brush fire that starts with a small ember. What we need to do is stomp out the embers.”
Later, Holt told a Crow’s Nest reporter that he was not consulted by USFSP about the African journalists’ pending visit.
“Independent decisions are being made in situations like this, and perception is being taken into account,” he said.
Reichgelt acknowledged that USFSP did not consult Holt’s infectious disease division. But he said the university did confer with other medical authorities and study information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the Poynter Institute, Franklin said his staff looked at CDC research and consulted the Pinellas County Health Department and “made the determination that the risk was exceedingly low in hosting” the African journalists.
The journalists will be with the State Department in Washington, D.C., for four days before they come to Florida, Franklin said, and federal officials have “obviously come to the conclusion that it’s safe.”
“In coming to this decision, we considered not only our history of international work, but most importantly the health and safety of our employees and the community,” he said.
As a teaching institution that trains international journalists both here and abroad, Poynter is a natural fit for journalists in the Murrow program, Franklin said. Journalists from 63 countries are getting Poynter training this year.
Asked if USFSP will be involved in Poynter’s program for the African journalists, Franklin said the university has been invited.
“We’ve invited USF to participate,” he said. “We haven‘t heard anything back at this point.”
Information from Bloomberg Businessweek, the International Business Times, the Tampa Bay Times, the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post was used in this report.
Amanda Starling and Jennifer Nesslar contributed to this report.
