The Overlooked Throng

While discussing my recent musings, someone asked me why I was so down on the coverage of the missing girl in Aruba. I felt that my reasonings deserved some further explorations, and those explorations will be be regurgitated forthwith.

Acccording to the White House Conference on Missing Children in 2002, more than 258,000 children go missing each year in the US. Of that number, around 200,000 are "abducted by family members who are seeking to interfere with a parent’s custodial or visitation rights." I'll eliminate them from my calculations for the purpose of this rant essay. That leaves 58,000 or so that are "are abducted by non-family members, often in connection with another crime." Some quick division reveals a number of 159 kids that are abducted each and every day. The girl in Aruba disappeared on May 31. Can you see where I'm going with this?

Allow me to do the math for you. 4,452 children have disappeared in the US since May 31. During that time, I have seen news reports on 6 missing children. However, the kid Brennan Hawkins was known to be "lost in the woods" and therefore does not count towards the 4452 number, which concerns abductions only. Neither does Luke Sanburg who winesses saw fall into the Yellowstone River. And the 3 kids in New Jersey, as it turned out, locked themselves in a trunk and were not abducted either. So that leaves one. One abduction (and I think we can safely assume by this point that the girl in Aruba has been abducted or worse) out of 4452 that is even covered by the national media. On to my point.

I just checked the top-of-the-hour Fox newscast . The girl in Aruba is still their top story. 28 days later, and with virtually no progress in the case other than a few arrests and then releases due to lack of evidence, this is still the equivilent of front page news to Fox (and CNN too, which I'll get to in a second...) Why?

The cynical side of me says it's becasue she is a pretty young blonde girl, and that if she were 300 pounds and acne-ridden we would not be seeing these endless photo montages every 15 minutes. While this is most assuredly true, I don't think it is the real reason. My conclusion is that Fox News, an obvious proponent (some might say "mouthpiece") of the current administration, finds itself with perilously little to cheer about in the current climate. A short list of items they cannot touch, due to their remarkably poor reflectivity on the Bush administration, includes:

Iraq
Social Security
The Economy
The War on Terror
Guantanamo Bay
Abu Ghraib
The Housing Bubble
The Patriot Act
Stem Cell Research
The Downing Street Memo
The Hunt for Osama
The Bolton Nomintion
Yesterday's Plutonium Decision
The National Debt

... and those are just off the top of my head. It is becoming harder and harder to put a positive spin on any of these topics. The solution? Missing cute girls in exotic locales, shark attacks, and Michael Jackson. Unfortunately the Jackson affair ended rather abruptly, and the shark attacks are not just dependable enough.

Lest you think I am engaging in FOX bashing, let me assure you that I find CNN no better. However I think that the reasoning is different at CNN. The latest figures show CNN's ratings in a serious slump. FOX currently enjoys a viewership 3 times larger than CNN. So, I'm certain that there are a couple of employees at CNN whose sole job is to watch FOX and see what they are doing, so CNN can do it too. This sort of "dog chasing its own tail" scenario helps no one, and it is to the inestimable detriment of the American people who so desparately need to know.

You want to know what is really going on? Go here. But I warn you: not only will you be required to think and digest some pretty important information, you will also become woefully uninformed on the latest events in Aruba.