Child Snatchings Are Hot Button Issue for Media

Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

August 8, 2002

Are we all in the exploitation business?

Are journalists basically vultures who pick at the carcasses of tragedy victims?

And are politicians also getting into the act? The recent outbreak of media hype over child-snatchings seems to know no bounds. All manner of relatives, friends and the surviving victims themselves are rounded up for the talk show circuit, their grief marketed for public consumption. It’s almost expected now: something terrible happens to you or your family, you head for the nearest studio and tell the world. George Bush has now entered the fray. Even though, statistically speaking, the number of child abductions hasn’t increased at all, it’s now enough of a hot-button media issue to warrant a presidential conference – the kind of showy but shallow initiative that used to draw ridicule for the Clintonites.

The big “get” this week was Katie Couric’s interview with the abducted California teens, Tamara Brooks and Jackie Marris. They described their ordeal in graphic detail, up to the point where the cops killed their drunken kidnapper. (News organizations that generally don’t identify rape victims got caught in a box when the rape information surfaced about the already-publicized teens. Couric didn’t ask them about that directly.) “You guys have a bond now that will probably last the rest of your lives, don’t you think, considering what you’ve been through together?” Couric asked. “Yeah,” said Brooks. “It’s amazing what kind of a friend you can make in such little time,” Marris said.

We’ve all become so jaded about this sort of thing that we sometimes forget to ask: Why on earth would young women want to relive the awful experience in public so soon after it happened? Made-for-TV movie deal to follow? A revolting spectacle, declares Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. (You can read our profile of Lopez here.) “What parent would allow a child who’d just been the victim of such a harrowing nightmare at the hands of so despicable a man to talk about it on television a mere 24 hours later? . . . “Although we sometimes commit our own sins of excess in the newspaper business, we hadn’t used her name in The Times because of our policy against disclosing the identities of minors who are victims of sex crimes. But here she was on TV, 17 years old and sharing her story with unseen strangers, speaking with an eerie detachment. “Obviously, she’d been through hell, and I almost wanted to go tell her to get back in the house and slam the door on the next reporter who came around asking for the details.

“The beauty of the deal for television, which so defines our culture, is that there is no accountability for such exploitation. TV doesn’t have to admit that having cheapened women at every opportunity, shamelessly selling titillation at a profit in the billions, it is in no position to comfort the victims of a violent sexual assault. . . . “Flanked by parents and other relatives, they told their story to Katie Couric on the ‘Today’ show. The story was chopped into segments–toothpaste or some such had to be sold–and spun into the blender that trivializes tragedy and numbs us all.” Salon’s Michelle Goldberg, following up on a piece by Michelle Cottle of the New Republic, says the media are out of control: “All summer long, the news has been dominated by tales of vicious strangers grabbing young girls – Elizabeth Smart, Erica Pratt, Samantha Runnion, Tamara Brooks and Jacqueline Marris. Connie Chung’s new CNN show has practically become all kidnapping, all the time, turning the Smart family into national celebrities. . . . “All this might suggest that child kidnapping is on the rise. But it’s not. Random child kidnappings are actually declining. The real epidemic is one of saturation TV coverage. “According to the FBI, the number of children stolen in non-ransom, non-custodial cases has been shrinking for years. In fiscal year 1999 there were 134, while last year there were 93. In the first three quarters of this fiscal year, there have been 62, which basically works out to one less kidnapping a month. . . . “So if kids are actually safer from abductions now than they were a few years ago, why is the media behaving as if the country is suddenly crawling with predators? Why did our president announce a conference on the crisis as he departed for a controversial month- long vacation? Partly, it’s because the high-profile recent cases had ratings-boosting elements.”

The American Prospect sniffs at the sudden presidential involvement: “Is Dick Morris working for George W. Bush? How else to explain the president’s decision to launch a White House conference on missing, exploited, and runaway children? “It’s a classic Morrisian micro-issue, one that people seem to care about but that is totally divorced from the day-to-day of partisan politics. There’s just one big difference. Unlike, say, television violence, child abductions are not a real national problem. As Michelle Cottle pointed out when the Samantha Runnion case became national news, the only child abduction crisis is on television.

Real child abductions have actually been shrinking steadily for some years. “So why did Bush get up in the Rose Garden this month and claim that ‘America’s children and parents are also facing a wave of horrible violence from twisted criminals in our own communities’? Two possible explanations. One is that whereas Clinton, under Morris, looked for real local issues that could be readily addressed from the bully pulpit, this is just Karl Rove ginning up a faux crisis to distract American families from other crises – like, say, the economic one. “The other is that the president is running out of things to do, a fate the war on terrorism save him from last summer. His tax cut and education bill have passed; aside from that, his Social Security plan is in shambles, his energy bill is going nowhere, and he has no idea what do to in the Middle East. There’s no there there.” This just in – Cheney says he’ll run again, if the prez and his wife approve. Is there really any doubt? (And would Cheney be saying this if the boss was looking around for someone with a better ticker?)

The Saudis are determined to stiff us, says this AP account in USA Today: “Saudi Arabia has made clear to Washington – publicly and privately — that the U.S. military will not be allowed to use the kingdom’s soil in any way for an attack on Iraq, Foreign Minister Prince Saud said yesterday. “Saud said in an interview with The Associated Press that his country opposes any U.S. operation against Iraq ‘because we believe it is not needed, especially now that Iraq is moving to implement United Nations resolutions.’” Yup, those weapons inspections worked really well last time. “‘We have told them we don’t (want) them to use Saudi grounds’ for any attack on Iraq, he said.”

The White House seems undeterred. “The Bush administration emphasized today that it has made no decision on whether to go to war against Iraq, but left no doubt that it is still considering a military campaign to remove President Saddam Hussein,” says the New York Times. “The administration signaled its resolve in speeches delivered almost simultaneously, by President Bush in Madison, Miss., and by Vice President Dick Cheney in San Francisco.”Mr. Bush did not mention Iraq and Mr. Saddam by name, but there was no mistaking the meaning as he mentioned countries run by men ‘who poison their own people,’ as Mr. Saddam is believed to have done in poison-gas attacks against Iraqi Kurds.” Bush was also talking tough in Mississippi on a subject closer to home, and The Washington Post says this is no accident:

“President Bush commiserated with small victims of huge corporate scandals today as the White House launched a coast-to-coast effort to convince voters Bush has been a shrewd steward of a rocky economy.

“Appearing 11 miles from the headquarters of WorldCom Inc., Bush talked privately with one of the 8,500 employees laid off after the communications company admitted inflating profits by hiding $3.8 billion in expenses. . . . ‘I met WorldCom employees who no longer have work, who are disillusioned like me and others about the corporate fraud which is taking place in our country,’ he said. ‘You know what it means to be let down by shady corporate practices.’

“Bush’s rhetoric was notably tougher on corporate America than it has been in the past, as administration officials express increasing concern about the effect an anti-corporate tide could have on a pro-business president and his party. . . . Bush’s remarks today were part of a carefully choreographed effort by the administration to recite upbeat economic prospects. It comes as officials scramble to prevent investors’ distrust from further hobbling the economy.”

Speaking of investors’ distrust, the ImClone/Martha saga is heating up again, as we see in this Wall Street Journal report: “Federal investigators are negotiating an agreement with a Merrill Lynch & Co. trading assistant in which he could receive immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony against Martha Stewart in the ImClone Systems Inc. insider-trading case, said people familiar with the matter.

“The negotiations come as another major shoe dropped in the ImClone inquiry. Yesterday a federal grand jury indicted ImClone founder Samuel Waksal on insider-trading charges for trying to sell his ImClone shares – and tipping off family members to sell their stock — before the company’s Dec. 28 announcement that the Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t review the biotechnology company’s cancer drug. The indictment also includes additional counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and bank fraud. . . .

“Prosecutors haven’t struck a deal with the Merrill trading assistant, Douglas Faneuil. But if a pact is reached, it could be bad news for Ms. Stewart, who sold nearly 4,000 ImClone shares on Dec. 27. Ms. Stewart has said that she sold her shares because of a previously arranged agreement with her broker and Mr. Faneuil’s boss, Peter Bacanovic, to sell when the price of ImClone fell below $60 a share. Federal  investigators now have their doubts about her story.”

Not a good thing.

Have you been following the other Washington scandal at all? Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams, a quiet technocrat who succeeded Marion Barry and has made at least some of the trains run on time, was a shoo-in for reelection – he didn’t have a real opponent in either party. Then there was this little matter with the petitions.

“The D.C. Court of Appeals yesterday upheld the city election board’s ruling to strip Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ name from the Sept. 10 Democratic primary ballot, forcing the mayor to run for a second term as a write-in candidate,” says the Washington Times.

“In rejecting Mr. Williams’ appeal of the July 26 ruling by the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, Appellate Judges Michael Farrell,

Inez Smith-Reid and Eric Washington Sr. said it was ‘within the board’s authority’ to take the mayor’s name off the ballot.

“The board was justified in its ruling because ‘the nominating process has been seriously compromised by the actions’ of some of those who collected signatures for the mayor’s nominating petitions, the judges said.

“Earlier in the day, Mr. Williams told reporters at his weekly news conference that he intends to win the Democratic primary as a write-in candidate. ‘My whole effort has been for the last week to really get this write-in [campaign] under way,’ he said. . . .

“Meanwhile, the elections board said yesterday it could slap the Williams campaign with a $1.3 million fine for submitting 6,500 ‘obvious forgeries’ on his nominating petitions last month, and it referred Crystal Bishop, another Williams campaign staffer, to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the D.C. corporation counsel for criminal review.”

And this is how he runs an unopposed campaign.

Want to know why Bill Simon’s campaign is struggling? Check out this L.A. Times piece:

“As he campaigns for governor, Republican Bill Simon Jr. says he played almost no role in the business fiasco that led a jury last week to levy $78 million in damages against his family’s investment firm.

“He casts himself as a peripheral player in the William E. Simon & Sons investment of $16.5 million in the pay phone company of Paul Edward Hindelang Jr., a convicted drug trafficker who won the Los Angeles fraud case.

“But court records show Simon, who personally lost more than $1 million in the deal, participated in every stage of the partnership. . . .

“After the jury’s decision last week, Simon said he ‘had nothing to do with’ Pacific Coin. He also told reporters, ‘Frankly, I had very little involvement with this.’ . . . Still, fallout from the partnership with a man Simon calls ‘precisely the kind of criminal I used to pursue’ threatens to undermine Simon’s contention that his business acumen prepares him to lead a state with the world’s fifth-largest economy.”

ABC’s Note says the debacle “kind of strikes at the heart of Simon’s efforts to cast Democratic Gov. Gray Davis as an incompetent and even corrupt manager of the state. For many close observers, it is looking more and more like Simon might be the ONLY person Gray Davis can beat.

“If Davis wins, we might have a reverse of the 1994 situation in which Ann Richards lost the Texas governorship with high approval ratings. Davis might flip that equation and get re-elected with record LOW approval ratings.”

And an L.A. Times follow-up on Cheney’s visit to the state: “The vice president did not lend a word of public support for GOP candidate Bill Simon Jr., whose gubernatorial campaign has been struggling to contain the fallout from a $78-million verdict against his family’s investment firm.”

Not that Cheney’s backing would have been an unalloyed plus, Salon observes: “While the Bush administration has given Cheney glowing votes of confidence, pundits have begun to wonder whether Cheney is vulnerable – because of his heart disease, or because of the scandals – and whether the president will seek a stronger partner when he seeks reelection in 2004.

“‘This is a guy whose resume is the resume of the wealthy Republican businessman,’ Paul Light, an expert on the vice presidency at the Brookings Institution, told the Christian Science Monitor last month. ‘Dick Cheney is the Republican as fat cat. And the more the public focuses on the economy, the more Cheney becomes a liability for . . . the president.’”

New York is broke, but some people may not have noticed: “City cops are talking about walking off the job on Sept. 11, angry that their pay raises may only equal those recently given other city workers,” says the New York Post.

“Officers told The Post they know it’s illegal for them to strike — but they say the 5 percent annual raises arbitrators are said to be proposing in a new two-year contract are too small. Also proposed is that cops work an additional 10 shifts a year.

“‘On Sept. 11, we were heroes – and today we are just civil servants,’ a Manhattan officer said. ‘With one hand they pat us on the back,’ said a Brooklyn North cop. ‘And with the other they pick our pocket.’”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick weighs in on that hot abortion suit: “This week’s ‘Dad’s rights case’ – the Pennsylvania battle over whether John Stachokus could legally override his ex-girlfriend Tanya Meyers’ decision to have an abortion – has launched a thousand overheated conversations, the most striking element of which is this: People, even sensitive, feminist, pro-choice people, empathize with the father.

“Perhaps they don’t empathize with this father specifically – John Stachokus is allegedly a pretty controlling, and maybe even abusive, man. But this case reminds us of the truth at the heart of reproductive rights law in this country: Women have all the power, and men have none at all. That makes most fair-minded people very uneasy, but there’s not much we can do about it.

“Until the Associated Press report that Meyers has miscarried, fathers’ rights advocates had been seizing their sound bite moment. . . .

“Pro-life and fathers’ rights groups have used this case to argue vigorously for changing existing laws. We already know which laws the pro-life groups are targeting. The fathers’ rights groups have a tougher time suggesting laws to protect fathers from being shut out of reproductive decisions because ironically, while just about everyone agrees that excluding fathers from these decisions is unjust, no better alternative exists. The womb wins. The courts won’t stomach forcing a woman to bear a child against her will.” 

2002 The Washington Post Company