What's really going in on the world when Fox news has to distract people with a story about a missing 2 y/o?

Question

I live in Australia, and we get Fox news via satellite, and I think it may be the same version you guys get, but I can't be certain, but I just want to ask, why, when a study I found online showed that about 800,000 children a year go missing (http://www.slate.com/id/2157738/), is it such big news to find this one 2 year old child from Florida? A child who, from what it sounds like, has been missing for 5 weeks already.

What is this a smoke screen for? What is really going on in the world that they are trying to distract everyone from?

Thats my question.

Mikey

Answer 1

When 800,000 children a year go missing, it's a very big deal to find one...especially if the child is alive.  To find a child alive after being kidnapped is even more rare than finding one at all.  I don't know that those stories are necessarily "smoke screens," but as a mother, they are important for me to hear.  That's what news is about...getting to the viewers' emotions and making an impact.

Answer 2

It's been a 24 hour news cycle since the Gulf War of 1991. At the time of the war, CNN was a staid, straightfoward network with a small viewership of people who liked hard news.

After the war, cable news took off, and with the advent of Fox, everyone changed from news to infotainment, where you dress up stories as news. 2 year olds go missing every day, but every cable news outlet will pounce on something so banal to everyone but the family, and pound it mercilessly, like it's 4,000 people trapped in a collapsed subway tunnel.

It is sad, but in my country, the USA, the only reliable news program is the News Hour on public television, which features four stories nightly, each in-depth. They don't insult your intelligence by treating it as a headline, but give up to eight points of view.

Fox News, derisively known as Faux News, is merely an undeclared arm of the far-right Republican Party. They deliberately overload your brain with graphics and text scrolls.