Sunday's data from DR Congo's public health institute: 2,325 dead, 4,945 confirmed cases. That makes this the deadliest Ebola outbreak in the country's history, and per the World Health Organization it is moving faster than any outbreak before it — 2,000 deaths in under three months, a pace the 2018-2020 epidemic took five months to reach. The strain is Bundibugyo. There is no approved vaccine. Now the media question: where does a story like that live? On France 24's front page today — "Ebola in DRC: Deadliest outbreak on record 'outpacing the response'" — and on remarkably few others. * Regular readers know we've been here. On August 1 we wrote about Fox front-paging a tick bite in New York while 1,556 Ebola deaths went unmentioned. That was seventeen days ago. The toll has since grown by 769 people — a Grenfell's worth of dead every two days — and as of this evening Fox's world feed still hasn't found room for it. It has found room for an orca with possible shotgun wounds. We checked twice. * CNN, to its credit, did file — Sunday, Africa desk, clean wire-style copy. And buried in its middle paragraphs sits the most alarming number of the year: the case fatality ratio has doubled since June, from about 20% to 46%. Nearly one in two confirmed cases now dies. Not, experts stress, because the virus got deadlier — because patients are found too late. As an MSF specialist put it, many are "identified only after they die in the community." * Sit with that mechanism for a second, because it describes two things at once. The outbreak's fatality rate is rising because detection fails until it's too late to help. Western Ebola coverage has the exact same failure mode: the story gets detected when it reaches an airport. Until then, it dies in the community, uncounted. * We know this because 2014 ran the control experiment. When a single imported case reached Dallas, CNN put "Ebola: The ISIS of biological agents?" on screen — a real chyron, mocked into legend — and an anchor speculated on air about suicide bombers deliberately infecting themselves. Cable ran the panic for weeks. Total US cases that year: four. Total West African dead: 11,310, and the coverage curve tracked the American caseload, not the African one. The passport control at the border of newsworthiness has been operating for over a decade. * Credit where due tonight: France 24 has kept the DRC on its front page through the story's unfashionable middle — today's piece runs while the response is failing, not after. Al Jazeera logged the 2,000-death milestone a week ago as the "fastest-growing outbreak on record." One honest nitpick for our praised outlet: F24's "deadliest outbreak on record" headline is only true inside DRC's borders — the world record, 11,310, still belongs to the epidemic the industry covered mainly when it landed in Texas. When the superlative is the story, scope it. * The mindset, decoded: proximity bias isn't a vibe, it's measurable. Four American cases bought saturation coverage; 2,325 Congolese deaths at record velocity buys a wire brief and two non-US front pages. The doctors say the fatality ratio doubled because cases are found too late for treatment to work. That's the coverage diagnosis too — and unlike Bundibugyo, this one has a known cure.