Another regular feature of this blog will be links to certain kinds of stories that are regularly featured on the front page of CNN.com. They are always above the fold, so to speak, in their "latest news" link section. These stories always involve something horrible happening to small children. They are not newsworthy by any definition of the word; they are human interest stories that are interesting solely because they tug at deep-seated emotions. I call these "family horror stories." My wife reads them all the time and I suspect that she is representative of the main audience for these types of stories: middle-class parents who like to worry a lot about highly unlikely tragedies.
Here's today's example:
Here's today's example:
Newborn found in toilet
Jack Shafer at Slate has already written about this phenomenon but he was more focused upon the general tendency towards tabloid-style reporting and "infotainment." I am more interested in these family horror stories because of their content. I think we can all agree that various news outlets are reporting things that are not newsworthy, but I am specifically interested in the phenomenon of reporting horrible yet unlikely things happening to very small children in the United States.
Horrible things happen to children all the time. Children die of disease and starvation on a daily basis, obviously, but these are not the stories that make it to CNN.com. The stories that get reported and highlighted and emphasized are stories about people we can relate to with characteristics we may share -- middle class, white, American, living in relative peace and prosperity. If several dozen children die of malnutrition in Sudan, I doubt we would read about it on the front page of CNN.com, but if a Midwestern mother snaps and throws her kids off a bridge, I guarantee you that it would be a top story. So it's not just that kids are being injured and killed, it's that kids of people like us are being killed for reasons we can't understand. Death by malnutrition and disease in some Third World nation -- that we can understand. We think "That's just the way things are for those people." We shrug and move on. But when some affluent teenage girl kills her infant, we are puzzled and fascinated. What could possibly drive a person so similar to us to perform such a horrible act?
It stimulates us, too. We feel a huge rush of emotion when reading stories like this: How awful! How tragic! We immediately ask ourselves how we might react if we were those family members. We imagine ourselves in that situation and then we immediately think: Thank God I don't have to deal with that! And we move on to the next story after receiving this strange little jolt of morbid satisfaction.
It is this emotional rush that is the real appeal of these family horror stories. It goes beyond whatever empathy or interest we may have in fictional depictions of tragedy because it's absolutely real (and perhaps because the people generally depicted in television and movies are less like us than the middle-class parents and children in the news).
So what? you may be asking. So we get a little charge out of learning the details of someone else's tragedy. No, it's not newsworthy, but what's the big deal?
I think a proliferation of family horror stories makes us more paranoid. Even though our children are far more likely to die in automobile accidents than at the hands of some stranger-kidnapper, we spend a lot more time worrying about kidnappers than car wrecks. Just as TV news warps our perceptions of crime and crime rates [1][2][3], so do family horror stories make us more paranoid about our children.
This paranoia leads in turn to calls for new legislation designed to "prevent" certain "epidemics" of Bad Things That Happen To Children -- legislation that often ends up punishing children. (The excellent scholar and author Mike Males has a great deal to say about this issue.) For example, stories about MySpace predators lead to crackdowns on social networking from all sides: parents, schools, and lawmakers. "Child porn" legislation is used to punish 16-year-olds who take pictures of themselves flashing the camera. Ludicrous news stories about "warning signs" among teenagers (i.e. wearing all black, a less than totally deferential attitude, having different friends, listening to strange music, and writing weird stories) lead to persecution and punishment of non-mainstream kids. The unfounded "superpredator" fears of the early 1990s led to draconian prison legislation and expansion.
So that's why I'm annoyed with CNN's family horror stories: the more they are reported, the more they will encourage people to Do Something about This Horrible Epidemic of whatever. And what is often done is pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. For example, trying to prevent teen pregnancy by making teens feel guilty and ashamed about sex and pregnancy (hello, failure of abstinence education and virginity pledges!) will inevitably lead to the kind of good-girl infanticide that will make headlines all over again.
I'll continue to post examples of CNN's front-page, above-the-fold links to family horror stories here.
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