By Matt Bisanz

If one were to watch the news recently, one would see almost weekly reports on one person or another who has gone missing and presumed in the clutches of some despicable character. Another popular headline has been the losses at AIG or the controversy of the merger of MCI and Verizon. Even the evening news has an ever-increasing number of public interest stories involving the tragic losses or miraculous gains of some local individual. Even the front page of the supposed newspaper-of-record, the New York Times was dedicated to the revitalization of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Well I decided to see just how many people were affected by these stories of national importance. The most widely held stock is usually AT&T or Microsoft, each having around 2 million shareholders. Therefore, all these stories of corporate fraud affect at most 2 percent of the entire U.S. population; by comparison, 8 percent of the Sudan’s population has been murdered in a bloody civil war in the last year. Brooklyn has a population of around 2.5 million people, again for comparison 500 million people a year are infected with malaria and 2 million of them die each year.

Now, the news media love making big stories about how a bride went missing right before her wedding or how a child was abducted walking home from school, so I figured these must be pretty rare occurrences, otherwise they wouldn’t warrant this intense media scrutiny. I mean for the story of a woman missing in Duluth, Ga. to be heavily reported in New York City, this must be a pretty big event.

Well, according to FBI crime reports, last year there were 3,445 murders of people under the age of 22. In addition, there were almost 34,000 missing children in the United States in 1997. How useful is it for the media to focus on these stories that are tragic, but that affect a minuscule portion of the population?

Would it not be more beneficial to run front-page stories about the rape of Darfur until Bush imposed sanctions on the country? On the other hand they might discuss the Saudi chauvinistic oligarchy until women’s rights are achieved. Even on the home front, important stories are being relegated to the back pages in favor of these gripping stories of individual tragedy.

Before the Senate right now is a piece of legislation that would allow 25 interstates to be converted to toll roads. Now that is a piece of legislation that could affect the 8 million residents of Long Island should the LIE be one of the roads converted. Another under-reported story has been how President Bush cut federal student aid, effectively cutting some 90,000 low-income students’ scholarships. Considering that education effectively decides a person’s future earnings and has ramifications decades into the future, this is an important issue that has been pushed aside in favor of stories on the personal medical habits of 1,200 random individuals, also know as the baseball steroid scandal.

All I am saying is that the media need to refocus on what is important and place these personal stories in their proper context. A missing person story probably belongs on the local news, not on a national or even a regional channel. A missing child might belong in a local or countywide paper, but I question if it belongs in a paper with national distribution. Meanwhile, I know I will keep reading the back pages of the paper until they start printing something relevant on the front.