Did You See Any Suspicious Characters?
I majored in Communications. Looking back, I probably should have looked for a college with a solid Creative Writing program or a degree in Television or both, since what I really wanted was to write books or work at a TV station.
My college promised that they were working on getting a TV station and that they had a great radio station already. A full 10 years after I graduated, they finally got a semblance of a TV station (half an hour from campus) that only broadcast college sports. We had that in my high school.
Still, I’d gotten a scholarship of $500/semester that was only good if I majored in Communications – and I loved that school. It was tons of fun, plus the school colors had purple in them! I loved purple.
So I got a degree in Communications which, at the time, meant that I could try to find a job as a newspaper reporter. Since I had zero TV experience and never did an internship, I wasn’t quite sure how to get where I wanted to go.
I imagined myself on TV, standing in front of ruins in Kuwait some other war-torn country, reporting on the situation. I thought I would cover the Oscars ceremony and interview famous people on the red carpet. But one night, very late, I was flipping through the channels and I saw a news interview that changed everything.
A couple of teenage girls near Pittsburgh had disappeared. Vanished. No one was sure whether they’d been picked up by a stranger, or run away. But the reporter for the story feared the worst – and wanted us to know that.
REPORTER: Did you know the victims?
AUNT OF VICTIM (obviously distraught): Yes, she was my goddaughter. And her friend. We just really want them to be safe and come home.
REPORTER: Do you have any idea who could have taken them? Did you see any suspicious characters?
AUNT: No, of course not, we just want to find them and get them home safely.
REPORTER: Do you know what they were wearing at the time of their disappearance?
AUNT: Well, they’d just had softball practice. I guess they were probably wearing their softball uniforms.
REPORTER: Can you tell me what their softball uniforms looked like?
This went on and on: the crying godmother, desperately wanting to get the word out to her beloved niece that she was loved, and the young, merciless reporter who was going for the jugular with every question.
I sat up on the couch, my jaw on the floor. Even at 20 years old, I knew this was not the kind of reporting I wanted to do. I wanted to tell stories about the girls coming home, about war heroes, quintuplets being born, and puppies being rescued and given new homes. But wherever I looked on TV, even in the 1980s, the only happy stories on TV were at 11:27 – the last three minutes of the news cast – as if the only feel-good stories they could find were only worthwhile if they made the newscasters laugh before everyone went off to bed for the night.
This week, a report was released about COVID and how the U.S. news coverage was far more negative than the coverage in other countries. I thought: how could it take 30 years for them to realize what I knew after watching one story of two missing teens? We report bad news because it gets good ratings.
I have no idea if those girls ever made it home. I stopped watching the news for decades after that. Now I remember why.