The Market for a New Pandemic

There isn't a cable news producer on earth who could resist the temptations presented by the outbreak of a rare and deadly communicable disease — and on a cruise ship, no less. Stories like those present ambitious commentators with conflicting incentives. The foremost imperative is, of course, to inform the public of their relative risk, but the human-interest element is also irresistible. Filling news consumers' heads with lurid images of a diseased ghost ship bound for ports unknown is the sort of thing that captures eyeballs in an age of short attention spans.