Ringing false alarms: skepticism and media scares

The American public gets from its news media a steady stream of "wake up calls" to panic over--daily or weekly alerts of things to worry about, crises to address. Though many of these problems are real, others are little more than phantom fears. Since the news media give us no way to distinguish the real problems from the exaggerated ones, the best antidote is a healthy dose of skepticism.

The news media both inform and misinform their audience. As John Ruscio discussed in his SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article Risky Business: Vividness, Availability, and the Media Paradox" (March/April 2000), journalists' alarmist coverage creates misperceptions about the world. News outlets jockey to be the first to warn the public of some new menace, sensationalizing the problems in the process. The list of crises that the news media report on seems endless: shark attacks, heat stroke, anthrax, missing children, weapons of mass destruction, killer bees, snipers, flooding, breast implants, rising crime, airline crashes, and so on.

Diseases provide reliable fodder for alarmist headlines: warnings about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), AIDS, and anthrax appeared in the news in recent years. Influenza kills about 37,000 Americans annually, yet up until very recently it was exotic and exceedingly rare diseases like West Nile Virus, Mad Cow Disease, and ebola that grabbed headlines and worried the public. In the last few years the pendulum has swung back, and flu is a danger once again, with each year being touted the worst flu season ever--and each year the pronouncements are proven false. As David Brinkley said, "The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."

In this fear-charged atmosphere, how are we to tell which topics are truly dire threats and which are simply chimera? In many cases, the problems that the news media, activists, and politicians hype are real enough; however they are frequently greatly exaggerated and mischaracterized, and the solutions proposed to fix those problems do little or nothing to actually address the issues. Here I bring some skepticism to bear on media scares of recent years.

Exploiting Exploited Children

No politician or government official ever lost votes by proposing or endorsing laws that protect children. The effort to protect children from predators is in many ways a business, and business is good. Whether or not children actually need the protections created in their names is a frequently ignored question. Images of children are routinely used for political purposes. Politicians and legislators know that supporting and proposing bills helping children will benefit them, and voting against any bill that might affect children is inviting attack from others.

Cynthia Crossen, in her book Tainted Truth, notes that "Since bigger numbers almost always mean bigger allocations or more attention, most of the numbers flying around policy debated exaggerate on the high side" (Crossen 1994). Many advocates and activists happily inflate their crises for attention. Denny Abbott, former national director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, has stated that "In my twenty-five years in social services, I have never seen an issue as exploited as the problem of missing children" (Abbott 1999).

The Department of Justice estimated that 440,000 children were lost or otherwise missing each year; such numbers are alarming but very misleading. David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire and director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center conducted a Justice Department study that found that the 440,000 figure includes children missing for any amount of time ranging from a few minutes to overnight. Another analysis of the Justice Department figures (this one done by Statistical Assessment Service) found that 12 percent of the "lost" children simply forgot the time while 19 percent misunderstood parental instructions. In all, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of the "lost" children were home within 24 hours.

While the term "missing child" may conjure up visions of malevolent, trenchcoated men luring children into their cars with candy or Pokemon cards, the reality is much different. The vast majority of "missing" children are taken by family members, such as when one divorced parent absconds with a child during legally sanctioned visitation. That may not be where the child should morally or legally be, but it is a far cry from a dangerous stranger's clutches. This puts the term missing in a whole new light, since at least one parent knew exactly where the child was. Missing then is used as more of a legal word regarding the child's status than a descriptive one describing the child's whereabouts.

Between 1990 and 1995, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) handled only 515 stranger abductions, 3.1 percent of its caseload. Just as a child fifteen minutes late for dinner can be considered a "missing or lost" child to inflate the figures, so too can runaways be counted among the missing. Though a child or teenager leaving home voluntarily may be in trouble, he or she isn't quite "missing or lost" in the usual parlance (Wilson 1995).