Ebola Arrives in New York; Cable News Clears the Decks for Rolling Coverage

By Mark Joyella 

B0rMF7DIgAAD5i0Well, Canada, it was nice, but, well, we’ve got Ebola in New York. You could almost hear the cell phones ringing with news executives’ re-worked plans: We’re going to pull you guys out of Ottawa as soon as you’re off the air. Everybody to New York.

The cable news networks reacted with a frenzy of reporting Thursday evening in the wake of New York City’s first confirmed case of Ebola.

As New York is home to the nation’s major media, the emergence of Dr. Craig Spencer was enough to send producers pulling the keys from around their necks to unlock the nuclear launch codes. This, my friends, was big. Sorry, Dallas and Atlanta, I mean, well, do we really have to explain this to you?

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CNN and MSNBC devoted wall-to-wall coverage to Ebola ahead of a planned news conference in New York, while planning extended coverage into the night and for Friday morning. Fox News announced it would air a live edition of “Hannity” at 10 p.m., followed by a live hour of “The Kelly File” with Megyn Kelly at 11 p.m. “Fox and Friends First” will begin live coverage at 4:30 a.m.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, at the Ebola news conference that was carried live on cable news and streamed online, said New York, essentially, had been ready and waiting for this. “What happened in Dallas was the opposite,” the governor said. “The more facts you know, the less frightening the situation is.”

So on with the intense coverage then–and no panic, okay? FoxSports.com writer Erik Malinowski grabbed a photo of CNN’s Ebola 7-box (above), about which author Adam Sternbergh noted “there are more people on that screen than have contracted Ebola in the USA.”

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