Tragedy and Media Sensationalism

I do not want to seem insensitive here. Children are at risk on the internet. Young people in general lack the ability to discern between what is safe and unsafe for them, and often times make emotional decisions despite the strongest (sometimes overwhelming) advice from smart and caring adults. Mix this with the amount of freaks and weirdos on the internet, and you have a powder keg waiting for a match.

That said, the internet is not inherently dangerous. While many geeky types can find out almost anything they want about you, most of them lack the cajones to do somehting with that information (I am essentially the poster-child for such people). The problem is that the media treats the media like a poison leaking into our school’s water supplies, infecting and raping our children.

Such is the case today with KOMO 4 News in Seattle. Like Gerald says, it’s annoying to turn on the news and just know you’re being spoon-fed a huge pile of you-know-what. The longer you sit and watch, the more you eat too, since it’s mostly you-know-what on there. Notice the following story:

Girl, 14, disappears after online relationship

A 14-year-old Boise, Idaho, girl has disappeared and is believed to be in danger after meeting a 27-year-old man on the Internet.

I originally clicked to this article because as Otis pointed out, the car he’s allegedly driving her away in has the license place OMGROFL (Oh my god, rolls on floor laughing). I barely made it to that point of the story though, as I sat and re-read the first sentence over and over again. “A 14-year-old Boise, Idaho, girl has disappeared and is believed to be in danger after meeting a 27-year-old man on the Internet.” What relevancy does it have that they met over the internet? Is that what put her in danger? How does that sentence make any sense at all. It should read: “A 14-year-old Boise, Idaho, girl has disappeared and is believed to be in danger after MEETING UP A 27 YEAR OLD COMPLETE STRANGER WHO LOOKS LIKE THIS.” She is not in danger because they met on the internet. She is not in danger because she met him. She is in danger because fro some reason she traveled over 500 miles form home to meet up with a compete stranger who is almost twice her age. How. Stupid.

Of course, the media won’t run with the story “14 year old girls shouldn’t meet up with 27 year old strangers” because nobody cares. They will all say, “duh, we know that.” So they have to SELL the story to you, which means they need a bad guy. The problem with casting the 27 year old as the bad guy (besides the fact that he has the dorkiest license plate ever, almost as silly as the delicious library guy’s Lotus’ license plate: pwn3d.) is that nobody cares. We don’t want to hear about the neighbor kid who’s luring girls in and kidnapping them. We don’t want to think about nice looking young people who are bad inside, but we want to think “the Internet” is evil.

The problem here is the lesson learned. Naieve parents hear “Don’t let your kids online” and will react by closing Facebook profiles, MySpace pages (good move, btw), and moving a bunch of Flickr pages to Private. The problem of course, is even with the whole internet barred off from kids, alleged perverts like Mr. Morgan D. Jones will still find victims. They’ll find neighbor kids, or schools. They will continue to be perverts, the just won’t drive across 10 states to take kids.

The lesson learned should be “parents, watch your kids, talk to them about REAL dangers and be involved in their lives.” It took Mr. Jones several days to get to Boise, in that time well connected parents would have known he was coming. The police could have been waiting in her kitchen for him.

Please people, use some common sense. Don’t believe everything you see/hear/read.

UPDATE: