The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [43]
Following the Denver Post’s revelations, for several magnificent months the media actually set about to correct the record and calm people down. CBS News ran a story in which they showed an excerpt from a commercial for one of the many products being marketed to worried parents at the time—a warning buzzer that attached to a child’s clothes—and quoted an expert suggesting that people not waste their money. “Exact figures are in dispute, but child abduction by strangers appears relatively rare,” CBS correspondent Steve Young noted at the end of his report.27
The Washington Post, in a page-one article in late 1985 entitled “Abduction Publicity Could Scare Children,” told of an elementary school counselor in Silver Spring, Maryland, who spent much of her time consoling children who worried that someone would follow them home. “They’re scared, and I feel like they’re not having fun anymore,” the Post quoted her. On milk cartons, television programs, billboards, posters, and at mass fingerprinting sessions in shopping malls, the article went on to catalogue, kids were being bombarded with the message that “today’s world is a dangerous place.” The article said that famous pediatricians such as Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton regard this onslaught as unhealthy for children. “I don’t think it’s really appropriate to make them afraid of everybody,” Brazelton was quoted.28
The trend toward corrective reporting was short-lived, however, and easily offset by aggressive campaigns from advocacy groups such as the Adam Walsh Center, Vanished Children’s Alliance, and others whose spokespersons are parents of abducted children. Soon after Missing Children’s Day in 1995, NBC’s “Today Show” ran a segment with John Walsh, whose more recent claim to fame is as host for nearly a decade of “America’s Most Wanted,” a popular “reality” television show whose stock in trade is stories about psychopathic killers who ambush innocent, unsuspecting women and children. The police have “new information about the case,” Katie Couric reported in voice-over at the top of the segment, while a snapshot of little Adam filled the screen. When she introduced Walsh, however, he did not actually discuss any new information, and the interview quickly deteriorated into fanciful speculation. “I truly believe that if Adam’s murderer isn’t found in this life,” Walsh said, “he will get justice in the next life.” The segment ended with Walsh wondering whether “Adam’s murderer has gone on to kill other children or might try to hurt our family again.”29
Walsh is an exemplar of a particularly influential category of person in the culture of fear: the grieving parent-cum-celebrity. Politicians respond to these people by passing legislation memorializing their dead child. Dale Russakoff, a reporter at the Washington Post, documented that in just an eighteen-month period ending in mid-1998 more than fifty laws had been passed by state legislatures with names like Jenna’s Law (New York), Amber’s Law (Texas), and Stephanie’s Law (Kansas). Commenting on the trend, Stephen Schulhofer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, suggested to Russakoff, “Policy issues are reduced to poster children and you have an up-and-down emotional vote as if you’re choosing between the killer and a particular child.”30
In the media too policy issues around child abduction get framed by parents-cum-celebrities. During the time period that Schulhofer studied, for instance, John Walsh was almost omnipresent in television and print coverage about child abductions and murders. Following the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night 1996 and the publication of Walsh’s memoir,