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Subtract from the battery of accounts in news stories all instances where the “children” lured out of cyberspace were actually undercover adults, and what remains? Several of the most widely covered incidents involving real children turn out to be considerably more ambiguous than they seem on first hearing. Take for instance the murder of eleven-year-old Eddie Werner in a suburb in New Jersey in 1997. Defined in the media as the work of a “Cyber Psycho” (New York Post headline) and proof that the Internet is, as an advocacy group put it, “a playground for pedophiles,” the killing actually bore only a tertiary connection to the Net. Eddie Werner had not been lured on-line. He was killed while selling holiday items door to door for the local PTA. Reporters and activists made the link to the Internet by way of Werner’s killer, Sam Manzie, a fifteen-year-old who had been having sex in motel rooms throughout the previous year with a middle-aged man he had met in a chat room.

In an essay critical of the reporting about the Werner murder Newsweek writer Steven Levy correctly pointed out: “Cyberspace may not be totally benign, but in some respects it has it all over the often overrated real world. After all, one could argue, if young Eddie Werner had been selling his candy and gift-wrapping paper on the Internet, and not door to door, tragedy might not have struck.”32

In that same vein, consider a suspenseful yarn that took up much of the space in a front-page piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Youngsters Falling Prey to Seducers in Computer Web Crime.” It was about a fifteen-year-old whose parents found him missing. Using the boy’s America Online account, they discovered that he had been sent a bus ticket to visit a man with whom he had communicated by e-mail. The parents frantically sent messages of their own to the man. “Daniel is a virgin,” one of the parents’ outgoing messages said. “Oh, no, he’s not,” came back the chilling reply. Yet when the reporter gets to the conclusion of Daniel’s saga it’s something of an anticlimax. The teenager returned home and informed his parents he had not been harmed by his e-mail companion, who was only a little older than Daniel himself. Nonetheless, the moral of Daniel’s story was, according to the Los Angeles Times reporter: “Such are the frightening new frontiers of cyberspace, a place where the child thought safely tucked away in his or her own room may be in greater danger than anyone could imagine.”33

Now there’s a misleading message. For those children most at risk of sexual abuse, to be left alone in their rooms with a computer would be a godsend. It is poor children—few of whom have America Online connections—who are disproportionately abused, and it is in children’s own homes and those of close relatives that sexual abuse commonly occurs. In focusing on creeps in cyberspace, reporters neatly skirt these vital facts and the discomforting issues they raise.34

Raw Numbers and Pedophile Priests

The news media have misled public consciousness all the more through their voracious coverage of pedophiles in another place that many Americans privately distrust and consider mysterious—the Catholic Church.

John Dreese, a priest of the diocese of Columbus, Ohio, justifiably complained that a generation of Catholic clergy find their “lifetimes of service, fairly faithful for the great majority, are now tarnished and besmirched by the constant drone of the TV reporting.” Writing in Commonweal, the independently published Catholic magazine, Dreese acknowledged that some of his fellow priests abuse children, and he decried the bishops who let them get away with it. But the media, Dreese argues, “seem more and more ideological. ‘Roman Catholic priest’ or ‘Father’ are consistently used in their reporting. Rarely is the generic term of minister or simply, priest, used. Shots of the inside of a Roman Catholic church, of angelic altar boys in cassocks and surplices, and first communicants dressed in pure white dramatically highlight the bold betrayal of