Transcript
Missing
June 14, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
MIKE PESCA: Brooke Gladstone is on vacation. I'm Mike Pesca. The kidnapping of a child is the prototypical parental nightmare, and thus riveting story material. Yet, though there are between 200 and 300 such cases each year in the United States, few attract the media's undivided attention such as occurred this week in the Utah abduction of 14 year old Elizabeth Smart. Here is MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield on location in the search team's map room.
ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: Mapping is an, is a, is a crucial part of this. Every single area that they decide upon will be searched and at times it'll be searched twice as well.
BOB GARFIELD:From the moment Elizabeth was reported kidnapped, the media -- especially cable news -- massed in Salt Lake City, and that suits Ben Ermini, director of missing children for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He joins us. Ben, welcome to On the Media.
BEN ERMINI: Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: What is it about Elizabeth Smart's apparent abduction that has captured the attention of the media?
BEN ERMINI: Well I think probably the circumstances surrounding the child's abduction. The child was abducted from her bedroom by an abductor who came into the house and abducted her at gunpoint, and the fact that there, there was another child, sister, in the room along with them. And probably because of the fact that the child was abducted from an affluent neighborhood -- and so this is the type of case that the media would become interested in.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, obviously notwithstanding the fact that they're living through a nightmare from a publicity point of view, the Smart family has more or less hit the jackpot, have they not?
BEN ERMINI: Well, I, I think they have. I think that they're getting a lot of attention, and I think that's important. I mean if you look at the Chandra Levy case, that case got a tremendous amount of media attention, and it got the attention because there was a congressman involved in that particular case.
BOB GARFIELD:Chandra Levy is probably the apotheosis of the gross, out-of-proportion attention to a single missing person. Do you ever in your position -- even in your position -- wince when one case is so disproportionately covered by the media to the exclusion of others?
BEN ERMINI: Yes. We had a case down in Houston -- Laura Aiella [sp?] case -- a young girl who was sent out by her mom to pick up a newspaper at a local gas station, and the child never returned and we tried to get as much coverage as we could for the child, and for some reason it wasn't getting a lot of coverage.
BOB GARFIELD: Now Laura was Hispanic?
BEN ERMINI: She was Hispanic, yes.
BOB GARFIELD: Rich or poor?
BEN ERMINI: I would say she probably comes from a poorer class family.
BOB GARFIELD:I guess I may as well not be coy about asking you this -- do you think if Laura Aiella were rich and white -- that the national cable channels would have been on the Aiella doorstep, camped out there for the duration?
BEN ERMINI: I don't know what the motivation of the media is.
BOB GARFIELD: But what I'm asking you is do you get frustrated when these, say, less inviting cases of tragedy don't get picked up by the media?
BEN ERMINI: We have 4-- 5200 active cases in our data base. I'd like to see a lot more of those cases getting national attention, and I certainly don't think that we shouldn't be providing the national attention to the Elizabeth Smart case, because I think the child is in danger, and I think it's important that we do it -- I wish we could do it in more cases.
BOB GARFIELD:But if you gave every case the Elizabeth Smart treatment and you, you say you have 5200 active cases in your files, there would have to be a missing children channel, wouldn't there.
BEN ERMINI: Yeah, I have no problem with that! I would certainly encourage that type of a, a channel.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well thank you very much.
BEN ERMINI: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Ben Ermini of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. What would distinguish a Missing Child Channel is the convergence of the media's interests and those of the victim's family.
ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: We do want to give you a 1 800 number, because no matter where you are across America, there is that chance you might see this blonde, beautiful little 5' 6" - 105 pound girl.
BOB GARFIELD:Joining me now is Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar for the Poynter Institute. In child abduction cases, Clark says, audiences are confronted with the public agony of desperate people whose need for help trumps any wish for privacy.
ROY PETER CLARK: The discomfort of watching people in agony up close. In the case of missing children, it's one of the only times that people put themselves in that circumstance intentionally. Most of the other cases of public grieving that we know about, the press is pictured and sometimes caricatured as predatory and intrusive. When I see the parents start to cry and I see the camera perspective move closer and closer-- I actually have been known to pick up the clicker and surf over to ESPN.
BOB GARFIELD:Well I guess that's the question then -- when, when the exploitation in a story like this is happening with the express complicity of the exploited parties, isn't there some special responsibility for the media to consider its actions and to behave with some modicum of sensitivity or is it just, you know, we've got a free pass here -- let's just wring out every molecule of emotion that we can.
ROY PETER CLARK: If I were an editor, if I were a news director, there's one question that I'd have to answer, and that would be what's the journalistic purpose of this story? If I can defend some larger, more important social purpose, then the decision to give extraordinary coverage to a particular story will be easier.
BOB GARFIELD:So in a case like this in which you can easily rationalize the social purpose by helping the parents and helping the police, is there some threshold of the number of hours of saturation coverage before you, you've kind of expended the capital that that social purpose has endowed you with and you have just moved over into the realm of gross exploitation and pandering to viewers' say basest instincts?
ROY PETER CLARK: One of the great historical precedents for us is going to be the Chandra Levy case and the way in which that case fell off the radar screen, even as, as it dominated our attention - but September 11th comes along - one of the great news stories and-- one of the effects of that was to just show the shallowness of that particular story. I think that's a moral lesson that a lot of journalists can long remember.
BOB GARFIELD: Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. [MUSIC]