Right after I post this column, I am going to go watch the first game of the World Series, which (thankfully, unlike the rest of the postseason) will actually appear on broadcast television. Now, while I personally was cheering for an "all orange-and-black" World Series (right before Hallowe'en!), sadly the Orioles did not make it past the Royals -- even after posting a spectacular season, where they wound up around 15 games ahead of the New York Yankees (with the Red Sox in the basement). That right there is an almost-miraculous season in the toughest division in the baseball, so to get within one step of the finals was spectacular enough for Baltimore fans. At least, for this one. This is all one way of saying I will be rooting for the San Francisco Giants against Kansas City this evening (another big reason is to promote marital bliss, since my wife is a big Giants fan).

But I didn't sit down to write about baseball. Instead I'm going to just use it as a shameless hook to talk about something entirely different. Before tonight's game commences, as with all sporting events in America, we will be presented with a moment of civic pride. Tonight, the crowd will all stand and sing our national anthem -- in the bicentennial year of it being written, no less. Our national song's first verse (the one everyone knows the words to) is composed of two questions, much like a Jeopardy! response. Both ask essentially the same thing: "Is our flag still there? Can you see it?" The final question asks resoundingly: "O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?" So while I admit it is a common journalistic affectation (one I use probably far too often) to transform a provocative statement into a headline question just by adding punctuation, today I can correctly say that the question mark in my title is actually part of the quote itself.

I have shortened this line to the part that asks the question that really needs asking right now (which is another way of saying my roundabout introductory ramblings are about to actually get to the point): Are we still "the home of the brave"? Are we, really? Or have we become a nation that responds to every perceived threat with nothing short of outright panic? One wonders what Francis Scott Key would say today were he to witness the metaphorical collective loss of sphincter control that seems to accompany each "crisis" that comes down the pike. Another way to ask this question is: Has America truly been showing its chops as "the land of the brave" to the rest of the world lately? Or have we fallen just a wee bit short of that lofty goal?

The national broadcast news finally -- finally! -- actually led with a different story than Ebola last night. This was after roughly three solid weeks of breathless reporting, which didn't just lead each newscast, but which consumed approximately half the screen time of each and every night's news shows -- across the board. For three weeks.

Of course, Americans have always been somewhat susceptible to mass hysteria, especially media-induced mass hysteria. The classic example is from Hallowe'en, in fact, when Orson Welles created a fictional bit of radio entertainment based on The War Of The Worlds, which convinced some folks back in 1938 that alien monsters were rampaging across New Jersey. But although the Welles broadcast was presented as art-imitating-life -- as a series of "news bulletins" throughout the course of what was ostensibly just a normal radio program -- it was entirely fictional. It was entertainment. No responsible news organization went on the air that night and told America -- as confirmed fact -- that aliens had indeed landed on the East Coast. The lines were blurred between news and entertainment, but in one direction only.

Nowadays, we have a combination of a profit motive and a political motive for blowing panicky stories out of all rational sense of proportion. The news media is not really in the business of disinterested fact-reporting as a civic service to give back to the American people in thanks for being allowed to use the public broadcast spectrum. Network news once used to be considered a "loss-leader" by the networks -- something they had to do out of civic duty (like jury duty, perhaps), but not something they tried to make any money from. Those days are long gone. These days, it's all about shocking the American public as much as possible in order to draw the audience in and get good ratings -- in order to keep the advertising rates high. Panic sells, in other words. The most obvious proof of this is the change in the way the national broadcast news covers the weather, which went from sober and fact-based to nothing short of sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism.

The Ebola obsession finally petered out at the end of last week, when the media's navel-gazing finally began (but, as usual, didn't go nearly far enough). The big stories on Ebola dwindled to "some people are panicking and going overboard in their fear" -- which was never really solidly connected to "we in the media have been trying to scare the pants off the public for a solid three weeks now, so it's really hard for us to fake amazement that some folks are apparently now freaking out."

The real reason the story is fading is that Ebola itself is fading in America. There have been no new patients to breathlessly report on, and the close family members of the patient who died (who lived with him while he was infectious and lived with all the contaminated household goods for days afterward) are now safely out of the quarantine period -- without any of them becoming sick.

To review the facts, we have had three weeks of apocalyptic obsession with Ebola from our trusted news organizations. Total deaths, to date, in America: one. Total infections which happened in America: two. Your chance of dying of Ebola in America: 1 in 320,000,000. Your chance of contracting Ebola in America: 1 in 160,000,000. We have not had hundreds of thousands get sick. We have not even had 50,000 die -- which is approximately the number of people who die of the flu every year. We have not seen 10,000 deaths, nor 1,000 deaths, nor 100 deaths. There has been precisely one death to date. When was the last time a single death launched this amount of news coverage? I can't think of a single example, personally. Even Ronald Reagan's death wasn't this big a story. Even Michael Jackson's death wasn't covered this obsessively, for such a length of time. And that's saying something.

If all of that doesn't convince you there is a rather large disconnect between the supposed "land of the brave" and today's America, consider the other bit of good news that appeared recently (which also contributed to the news media finally backing off their overzealous coverage): Nigeria was just declared Ebola-free, after taking aggressive contagion measures that worked exactly as designed.

The outbreak in Nigeria happened when a diplomat from Liberia arrived and collapsed at the Lagos airport. Both the airport and the hospital he was taken to were unprepared (this happened July 20, for perspective). But the key factor was the hospital refused to let him leave -- even after he raised a stink and tried to use his diplomatic status to place himself above medicine and above any sort of law. He failed (physical restraints became necessary) even though the Liberian government stated at the time that holding him was tantamount to kidnapping. The brave doctor who would not release him later contracted the illness and died. In all, twenty people were infected, and eight died. That is 1000 percent of the number infected in the United States, and 800 percent of the number of deaths here. And yet the disease was successfully contained.

Here in America, we have politicians demanding a "travel ban" on all flights from the affected countries in West Africa. President Obama should have immediately responded to such nonsense with a bold statement: "We have now successfully banned one hundred percent of flights to America from the affected countries," and then left it for everyone else to figure out that this was pathetically easy to do since no such flights actually existed -- outside the feverish delusions of a number of politicians, that is.

The politicians are slowly figuring this out, and are now calling for various other sorts of travel ban. One idea is to ban all visas from the affected countries, which would affect non-Americans. Another is to ban people who have stopped at some intermediate city (since there are no direct flights), but nobody will actually say how this would be possible. None of the proposed bans would bar American citizens from travelling from the affected areas, which would make them all utterly pointless (since a virus doesn't check the passport of who it infects).

Consider the following: the diplomat who travelled to Nigeria (their "patient zero") is a dual citizen of both Liberia and the United States. His family lives in Minnesota. He did not take a direct flight from Liberia to Nigeria -- he flew to a third city in between. And he's got diplomatic immunity. None of the travel bans now being suggested in America would have affected his travel one tiny bit, even if such measures were both actually possible and perfectly implemented. He was due to fly home to his family in Minnesota after his stop in Nigeria. And he's an American citizen.

What was especially telling in the Reuters report on Nigeria (not being an American news organization, the article was in no way panic-inducing or fear-mongering, it's worth pointing out -- it just had good solid information) were the things being subtly said about America in Nigeria. A presidential statement released with the news that the country was Ebola-free stated: "Nigeria's globally-acclaimed success against Ebola is a testimony to what Nigerians can achieve if they set aside their differences and work together." A Nigerian health official was even more blunt, saying that the lesson for the U.S. and the rest of the world is to "put aside the political barriers and focus on the issues at hand." Ouch. Reuters spelled it out a little more impolitely:

The cooperation between the central government in Nigeria and the opposition-led administration in Lagos state contrasts with the United States, where bickering between Republican and Democrat lawmakers over Ebola has eroded public trust.

This raises a painful comparison for Americans to face: are we even as good as Nigeria in a crisis? Have we truly fallen that low? Aren't we as a people confident that the American government and public health system can do the same thing that Nigeria just managed to do? Why are the people who normally beat their chests so proudly about "American exceptionalism" so often the ones crying "We're all going to die!" at the drop of a hat, these days? In sports, that would be derided as being a "fair-weather fan." To rise above it requires something a little less cowardly as a guiding principle, in fact, than unhinged and hysterical panic. Otherwise, we should just throw in the towel and change that last line in our national anthem.

We seem to have gotten back to baseball, which is where we began and where I'm going to end. Have a little faith in America, everyone. Let's all proudly not just sing but actually believe a tiny bit that we are indeed, "the land of the brave" -- with no question mark necessary at all.

[Credit Where Credit Is Due Department: I've been pondering this subject ever since I saw a thought-provoking headline on a story in the Huffington Post, which I will not quote (out of politeness) here. Bill Maher really deserves the credit for the core concept, in other words.]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant