MRC president Brent Bozell appeared on "Cavuto" on the Fox Business Channel Friday night to discuss Ebola coverage. Substitute host Connell McShane asked if the media were either overdoing it or underdoing it:
CONNELL McSHANE: Brent, let's talk about both sides of this first -- the idea that the media has not been doing enough. I mean, the Washington Post wrote this piece that basically said if the American media had paid more attention to Ebola over the summer when it was a story just in Africa, that attention would have been given to it and maybe that could have slowed down the spread of the virus. So what do you make first of that argument?
BRENT BOZELL, MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER PRESIDENT: Well, I think -- half-right. I think the Washington Post is right in pointing out that they didn't. It was kind of like the Obamacare website rollout. People overlooked the fact that it took the networks two-and-a-half weeks to focus on this disaster. Ebola broke in September. It only started getting covered about a week ago. So you could say, yes, they were late to the game. However, can we blame ABC News for Ebola? No! Can we say that this would have spurred this administration to act when it's still not acting? I don't think you can make that claim.
MCSHANE: Okay. So that was what was happening before we got to this point. Now that we're here, and now - and we know - even here on a Friday night, we're talking about it for a lot of this show. The other argument - and I'm sure there's something to this for certain individual members of the media. You could certainly isolate people and say, "This person has been alarmist" or "This person said something inappropriate." But the idea that the media overall has done too much, what do you make of that side of it?
BOZELL: You know, it’s like people say, well, you send - you send TV cameras to watch a politician give the same speech for the 90th time. Why? Because should something awful happen to him, God forbid, you'll have a camera that will have filmed it. And I think that's going on with Ebola right now. No one knows what's going to happen. It hasn't been a crisis yet in this country. Not yet. But I think everybody's on standby should something happen -- that they will be there covering it. There is - there's great uncertainty. So if nothing happens, will they have overblown it? Yes. If something happens, will they have done it correctly? Yes.
