Being in Liberia during Ebola made me distrust the media

I don't trust anything you see in the media — anything. And I have real reason behind this.

In September/October 2014 I was in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak (my first career was a full-time photojournalist/videographer for NGOs) and I was staying in the compound shared by Doctors Without Borders and Samaritan's Purse. I stayed in Dr Fankhauser's house (who later was named one of the TIME persons of the year) and photographed day in, day out, driving a crappy Mitsubishi Pajero around town.

The feeling in Monrovia was bizarre. No one shook hands, everyone bleached their shoes. Driving around, I was shaken down for bribes by police, paid bribes to guards to take photos in other places, all stuff I'd done before in other countries, but the streets were dead quiet (very different from the chaos I was used to in Western Africa).

On October 2nd (which happened to be my birthday) I got to suit up in a hazmat suit and go into the Ebola unit itself, an old church that had been converted into a 78-bed unit. I took a GoPro in, and still have the 1 hr 45 min footage. It was fairly gross so I will leave out most descriptions, but near the end I was helping a doctor by shining a flashlight on a lady while he stabbed her with an adrenaline syringe. I've never been queasy but I was hot. Encased in the hazmat suit, sweat literally filling up the bottom of my goggles, that sent me over the edge and I had to get out. Nurses stripped me out of the suit, spraying me down with bleach.And this is where the distrust in media comes into play. As frightening as Ebola was, it is only spread by contact with bodily fluids. In Liberia, it was spread by a practice of embracing the dead (a ritual where the whole family would sleep in the same room as the body for a few days after death). Ebola had a ZERO percent chance of affecting most of the world, at least anywhere with a modern understanding of health and hygiene.

So here I am, fresh out of the Ebola unit, and a British Sky News team is set up filming a segment just outside the unit in a Land Rover. Here's the kicker: the reporter was wearing PPE and mask and goggles. But around 24 inches away, the cameraman and the producer were in flip-flops and shorts. It was all smoke & mirrors.

Then, I woke up at midnight Liberia time to dozens of messages and a call from my mom. I'd been on the six o'clock news, and my grandparents (who I hadn't told) called my mom asking why I had Ebola. An ABC reporter had written the most factually incorrect and technically deceiving story imaginable, and it had run on TV using an old Facebook profile photo. It got my job wrong, implied that I was bringing Ebola back home, and had gotten opinions from local doctors without even telling them the real details.

I had messages from folks telling me "they'd follow me around town wiping off every doorknob I touched, so their kids wouldn't die" and "let the Africans take care of themselves" and "who do I think I am?"

(I got the story taken down within minutes, after cussing out the director of the local ABC affiliate)

There were also decent publications which actually interviewed me and got factual data, to be fair:

But that didn't stop the paranoia. Flying back (I had to go through CDC testing in Atlanta) I heard that the news station had a crew at the airport waiting to ambush me when I arrived. So my dad met me, snuck me downstairs through a back elevator, and brought a bag of groceries to my apartment to last through self-imposed quarantine.

It was all ridiculous, honestly. Whenever you see someone on camera wearing a hazmat suit, I guarantee you, behind the camera is a guy in flip-flops.