aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, April 30, 2005

Detective O’Reilly: Making America Stupider

CNN:

A Georgia woman, who was found in New Mexico early Saturday and who said she had been abducted, admitted today she had made up the story because she was nervous about her upcoming wedding, police said.

World O’Crap was watching the Bill O’Reilly segment on the case last night, before she was found:

Bill asked Greta [Van Susteren] if the police had any clues about who had taken the woman, because it was obvious that she was the victim of a crime, and was most probably dead.  Greta quickly replied that the cases of Audrey Seiler (the Minnesota coed who faked her own kidnapping) and Elizabeth Smart show that Wilbanks could still be found alive.  Bill pompously said that this case was different, in that Wilbanks was very close to her family, and was very responsible, so she obviously didn’t just run away.  Plus, it was only luck (he repeated that: “only luck") that Smart wasn’t killed by her abductor.  Bill added that Seiler had some mental problems, and in every case like her’s there are some signs that point to a hoax, but Wilbanks was 32-years old and had never done anything flaky before, and wasn’t the type to cause her family so much worry, so it was clear that she had been kidnapped or murdered.

Greta defensively said that we had to hope that she would be found alive, even if Bill was right about her not having just gotten cold feet and ran away.  Bill smugly commented that he knew enough about these kinds of cases to say with certainty that Wilbanks was the victim of some crime, and then asked about the status of the fiance’s polygraph…

The thing that bugs me most about this isn’t that Bill, the pompous jerk, was opining about something in the absence of evidence and turned out to be wrong (we have to expect that of Bill), but that he kept hyping the story as being another case in the "epidemic" of missing women and children who turn out to have been  murdered by their husbands, or raped and murdered by degenerate child molesters.  Sure, it’s just a ploy to attract viewers, but it causes harm, in that people start believing that attractive, white women are disappearing at an alarming rate in this country, and that all convicted sex offenders should by lynched to keep our children safe.  And then the more realistic dangers (like domestic violence to regular women, and kids dying from abuse and neglect caused by people in their own households) are ignored, since everyone is so focused on Laci Peterson and little Jessica Lundford. 

So, I think the new Fox News slogan should be: We Over Hype, You Over-React.  Or simply “Making America Stupider."