The saga of runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks is more than a hoax, it's the perfect representation of how the misdirection of priorities in the media is as dangerous as the misrepresentation of facts.
Nothing scares me more than when I turn on the cable news and come across 'round-the-clock coverage of a missing attractive, young white girl. No, it's not because I am reminded of an impending danger just waiting to befall friends of mine who fit this category- I am too much of a statistics buff to assume that such a thing is a valid fear. You see, contradicting my penchant for hard facts over emotion, I also tend to have long-term paranoia of an epic scale. Nuclear disasters, wars, rampant tornados, and the like are- in my mind- just sitting latent and ready to happen at any moment. (You can take the 13-year old boy away from the television, but you can't take the television out of the 13-year old boy. Alas, that's for another article...)
Thus, to me, an obsession for any specific missing attractive, young white girl is a sign that Americans are once again becoming lulled out of any prioritization of ongoing news by the needs of news outlets to keep pumping out "breaking news" at a steady rate. The viewer, at the same time, is not blameless here. We desire the format of 24-hour cable news because "breaking news" every few months was not doing it for us. We need an world-altering story every week- every few days, even, if it can be spared.
- RELEVANCE OF THE HOAX -
If you're not into reading lofty, extensive books on media philosophy, the news industry's work on the Jennifer Wilbanks case is an excellent crash course on the misplaced priorities of twenty-first century mass media. While I am not sure on the specifics of the criteria for which attractive, young women in peril get national coverage (190,000 American adults go missing every year, so we know the criteria is awfully tough), somehow bride-to-be Ms. Wilbanks fit the description and needed to be rescued. By all of us.
Atop scrolling stock quotes and sports scores, the investigation unfolded. Why would someone want to kidnap and then murder Ms. Wilbanks? What did her fiancé have to gain, if he did it? Would it be an affront to the family's wishes to cover her funeral live, or should TV cameras be kept outside?
The conclusion, of course, satisfied only her family and critics of the media: she was alive the whole time, and merely ran away to New Mexico because of nervousness about her upcoming wedding. (To be fair, we as a nation did learn a lot from this affair: Jennifer's wedding is going to be held in suburban Georgia, there are 14 bridesmaids and 14 groomsmen, and there are 600 invited guests. We don't know how many of those 600 are going to be there, but it is certainly going to be a grand celebration nonetheless.)
- MISDIRECTION, LAZINESS OR BOTH? -
While this story turned out to be a hoax, we do realize that dangers do exist- even in areas of the nation presumed the "safest." As well, no one would pay much attention to the media at all if all stories were prioritized merely by their statistical likelihood of affecting the greatest number of people with the most significant intensity. Thus, one could imagine stories like this- kidnappings, shark bites, lightning strikes, and other things that "aren't ever going to happen to any of us"- serving an anecdotal purpose, helping paint a more precise account of the world we live in. However, this is never the case in reality. Never once during the Wilbanks fiasco was the story told relative to real threats to all Americans. Rather, it- and all stories like it- remain pure dramatic voyeurism, and never news.
