Thousands of people go missing in the United States each year and many are never heard from again.
(ABC News, May 8, 2013)
Given the above, only God knows why searching for a chosen few becomes a media cause celebre. Hell, eight women went missing in the last five years in the same area of central Virginia where UVA student Hannah Graham went missing. Like Hannah, two of them, Bonnie Santiago and Janet Field, went missing this summer. Yet chances are very good that you’ve never even heard their names. Not to mention the role race plays in whose missing case the media deem worthy of their obsessive coverage.
In any event, Hannah went missing under suspicious circumstances on September 13. Within days the police named Jesse Leroy Mathew as “a person of interest.” They soon arrested him in Galveston, Texas, and extradited him back to Charlottesville, Virginia, on September 26. Needless to say he insists he had nothing to do with Hannah’s disappearance and knows nothing of her whereabouts. It is highly probative, however, that forensics link Mathew to a number of sexual assaults….
Meanwhile, media coverage of the search for Hannah has been surpassed only by media coverage of the hysteria over Ebola. This was borne out yesterday, when the media interrupted their 24/7 Ebola coverage to report “Breaking News” on her case:
Remains have been found in the search for Hannah Graham, a University of Virginia student who went missing on Sept. 13, Virginia police said.
Police have not confirmed that the remains, which where found behind a vacant home, are those of Graham…
‘Right now we have the discovery of human remains and a great deal of work ahead of us,’ said Col. Steve Sellers
(ABC News, October 19, 2014)
That’s right. This breaking news amounted to nothing more than the police saying they found remains that might be Hannah’s.
I appreciate, of course, that the police probably have good reasons to believe those remains are in fact Hannah’s. But, given the public interest they and the media have generated in this case, this breaking news smacked of a cruel tease.
This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with what passes for news in this age of Twitter. For it’s bad enough that media hounds could not wait to report this unconfirmed bit of information as breaking news. But only the Twitter phenomenon of making news for news sake (no matter how uninformed or dead wrong) explains why the police did not wait just a few days to confirm their discovery before holding their backslapping news conference. Indeed, it would seem perfectly reasonable in this perverse cultural context for the officer who found the remains to tweet about it before he told the officer in charge of the search….
But now the police have a captive audience for their next backslapping news conference – as the entire nation is now waiting with bated breath for them to confirm their findings. Mind you, because even those in charge have no qualms about making news just for news sake these days, I would not be the least bit surprised if they announce that the remains are not Hannah’s after all.