Only Thing There Is to Fear Is More Unchecked News
Commentary
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
Relax.
There’s been no explosion in the numbers of children abducted and murdered by strangers. In fact, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports a slight decline over this same time last year. Your children are not at increased risk.
If you’re wondering why it seems that they are, two words: news media. Electronic news media, in particular.
Last year, you will recall, the filler of choice was sharks. A summer of highly publicized close encounters of the toothy kind left many of us convinced great whites had it in for us. The beasts were implicated in a series of maimings, bitings, muggings, carjackings and insider training scandals.
No less an authority than Time magazine even declared 2001 “The Summer of the Shark.” Actually, it turned out to be “The Summer of Terror Targeting America While the FBI Fumbled for Clues Like Ray Charles in a Dark Room.” But let’s go with that shark thing, shall we? According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, there were 76 shark attacks. That’s for the entire year, throughout the entire world and only a fraction were fatal. Plus, that number represented a slight down tick from the previous year.
Surely the sharks are still biting this summer, but they’ve been all but ignored by the news media. Sharks are so 2001. We’ve moved on. Welcome to the “Summer of the Kidnapped Kid.”
Time hasn’t run that headline yet, but I’m expecting it any week now. It’s the only thing missing from a summer during which we have been inundated with stories of children snatched from the bosom of home by persons unknown. And we are dutifully unnerved.
Look, I’m not trying to belittle the suffering of those who have lost loved ones to kidnappers. Or, for that matter, those who have been attacked by sharks. No, my only purpose is to suggest that there’s been an unintended byproduct of the all-news-all-the-time culture. Namely, that an industry whose chief product used to be information has instead begun manufacturing a new thing: hysteria.
Or maybe it’s been that way all along. Certainly, there was no shortage of screaming, panic-stricken headlines back in the days when Bill Hearst and Joe Pulitzer were the men in charge. Maybe some news magazine of the time even felt moved to declare 1908 “The Summer of the Suffragette.”
Still, the gatekeepers of electronic news face a challenge undreamt of in the days when paper was the only news medium. Namely, they must feed a beast that is never sated, find a way to constantly fill endless hours of airspace. Even when there is slow news or no news.
So they get creative. They use stories they might not otherwise use, stories that might once have been dismissed as having limited national interest. They repeat, repeat and repeat. They discover trends that may nor may not actually exist. And in the process, they create impressions that may or may not have any basis in fact.
There’s nothing wrong with being aware that this child or that one has gone missing, nothing wrong with learning what precautions to take to safeguard children you love. But there is also nothing wrong with questioning hysteria, with seeking to understand whether the place news media are leading us to is one to which we really ought to go.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
