Ghost Stories in the Dark

A lot of our modern news reporting reminds me of sitting around a dying campfire on a summer night telling ghost stories, each storyteller challenged to raise the fright level over the last.

Take Melissa Huckaby, charged with the murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, which on its face, may qualify for the crime of the century – but that’s not quite enough. Reporters have dug up information suggesting that Huckaby has kidnapped children before and given them drugs. She also may be an arsonist. She did have past convictions for petty theft and also had a nasty divorce. Oh, did I hear them say that the Cantu murder occurred in a church?

I’m sure if they shave the back of Huckaby’s head, they will find the number 666 neatly tattooed above her right ear. Someone better get on the phone to Wes Craven – there’s definitely a movie here. I’m curious, however, in what country this woman is going to get a fair trial. If little green invaders come to Earth, let’s hope they’re available for jury duty.

What is the take-away from this reporting? Even your next-door neighbor from a respected church family could be a monster waiting to strike. You can change the scenery – make it Wall Street, and there you have Bernie Madoff. It all happened without warning, the story goes, until we get to the part about the obvious signs being there that were ignored – or no one listened to those few would who were trying to give us the heads-up.

It’s not that we shouldn’t hear about this stuff. It’s just seems to me that the media enjoy it a little too much, and so does the audience (My name is Mike, and I’m an adrenaline junkie….)That’s why horror movies have always done so well at the box office. But the stories that used to scare us aren’t good enough anymore, so the next camper has to tell us a better one. We all need to have our world rocked once in a while, but when does the rocking stop?

SARS and the bird flu didn’t quite cut the mustard, but now we have the swine flu. This could be the greatest pandemic to sweep the globe since 1918. Or not – we won’t know for a while yet. I do agree that most health authorities are taking the precautions they need to take. But in the meantime, it looks like we all get to share a good shiver.

The Fickle Media Spotlight

By now, you have heard the tragic story of Sandra Cantu, the 8-year-old from the California Central Valley city of Tracy, who had been missing for 10 days. Sandra’s story led the evening news in the San Francisco Bay Area almost every night since her disappearance. Hundreds of volunteers came from all over the region to help authorities search for her. There were tearful nightly appearances by family members and neighbors, and there were candlelit prayer vigils. How did it end? The little girl’s body was found by farmworkers in a suitcase pulled from an irrigation pond.

The Cantu case provides a disturbing parallel to a 1997 case I covered as a radio reporter in Southern California. Anthony Martinez was 10 years old when he disappeared from the town of Beaumont, not far from Palm Springs. While he was missing, his story led TV newscasts all over the region. Volunteers turned out in droves to look for him. There was a “prayer circle” one weekend in a local park, attended by Beaumont’s mayor. This story also ended badly. Anthony’s body was found about two weeks later in the foothills near what is now the Joshua Tree National Park.

These stories always bother me, for reasons apart from, or in addition to, the tragic circumstances involved. Exactly how do these cases become media events? Why do certain kids get the attention, when there are probably hundreds of other missing children around the country whose stories don’t make that level of news? Do they have better PR, with more media-savvy relatives? Are they cuter than other missing kids?

True, the media have to cover these stories, and it’s clear that the best way to dramatize any story is to focus on individual examples instead of statistics. But what conclusions are we to draw? Does this coverage teach a valuable lesson about adults doing a better job of watching kids, or does it just make parents more paranoid?

Does the coverage pump up false hope? When the tragic end is revealed, are all those volunteers feeling as if they wasted their time? And most disturbing: is all that praying a waste of time?

In the case of Anthony Martinez, a suspect is in custody and the wheels of justice are grinding away. As of this writing, the facts in the case of Sandra Cantu have yet to come out. But I wish I could come to a conclusion about all of this. Maybe that’s part of the pain we feel after these cases – caused by the inability to wrap them up and file them away under some neat philosophical heading. At least, that seems to be my problem.

There, now I’ve said it.