• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 697 0

are used in those ways, as I learned firsthand. When a student at the university where I work mentioned in passing that she relies on YouTube for help in understanding her math and science classes, I did a little checking and found a wealth of material. Upon typing “calculus” in the search box at youtube.com, I was sent to “Calculus in 20 Minutes,” a series of instructive, fast-paced mini-lectures by a professor of mathematics at Williams College. The one I watched had received nearly 150,000 views. A search for “physics” brought a lecture by a University of California, Berkeley, professor on atoms and heat that had received a quarter of a million hits. To be sure, those numbers don’t compare to the twelve million hits the video “Best Break Dance Ever” received, but they aren’t shabby.16

Missing Children, Missing Dollars

Scares about children being abducted off-line continued as well. Even in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when one might plausibly have expected pressing concerns to eclipse pseudoterrors, the media were preoccupied with missing kids. In the summer of 2002, just months after the attacks, I wrote an article for the Wall StreetJournal about a little experiment I did. Over the course of a couple of weeks, whenever I had the chance, I turned on the TV and flipped between MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and CNN to see what they were covering. Rarely did I have to wait more than twenty minutes to get a report about one or more child abductions. Most of the time, I didn’t have to wait at all.

How did editors and journalists defend spending so much airtime on child abductions? They used words like “trend” or “epidemic” even as child abductions remained extremely rare, and they threw out bogus numbers. On his Fox News Channel show, Bill O’Reilly talked of “100,000 abductions of children by strangers every year in the United States,” though an exhaustive study from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) that year found only 115 cases a year of “stereotypical kidnappings” (children abducted by nonfamily members and kept for long periods of time or murdered). “The majority of victims of stereotypical and other nonfamily abductions were teens—not younger children—and most were kidnapped by someone they knew somewhat—not by strangers or slight acquaintances,” a subsequent report in 2006 from the OJJDP noted. 17

Yet the obsession with kidnapped kids has shown no signs of slackening. In the late 2000s, the high-profile missing children were Caylee Anthony and Madeleine McCann. Madeleine, just shy of her fourth birthday, went missing in May 2007 from a resort in Portugal, and the story continued to get media attention for a couple of years, well after the Portuguese police had closed the case. Caylee Anthony disappeared in June 2008; her mother was eventually arrested for her murder. Caylee’s tragedy combined two high-voltage scares I have discussed in the book: the missing child and the monster mom.

Such sensational stories provided heart-wrenching material for all news outlets, but special credit in recent years would have to go to Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor who relentlessly covered missing children on her nightly HLN (CNN’s Headline News Network) program. CNN might as well rename HLN “CAN, as in Caylee Anthony Network, because HLN has been riding the toddler’s demise for hours each day,” Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey noted after watching her program for a few days in 2009.18

And the TV show wasn’t the half of it. Television and the Internet have become more symbiotic since this book was first published; nervous viewers can now access the details twenty-four hours a day. Around the time of Rainey’s column, I scanned the “Nancy Grace” home page and was greeted with: “Nancy Grace reports on George Anthony telling police about the smell of death in his daughter’s car trunk. Click here to watch!”19

In public lectures and media interviews, when I mention examples like those, and the actual statistics about kidnapped kids, I am often asked: Other than appealing