Readers aware of Laci Peterson’s connection to San Diego have been concerned and eager for news about the eight-months-pregnant Modesto woman who vanished on Christmas Eve. So, it got my attention Wednesday when I saw a story on the front page with Modesto in the headline. But when I read the full headline, I groaned. It said: “Modesto horror: New woman missing.”
Reader Janice Fukushima of Chula Vista wrote that her first thoughts were: “Oh, no! Now who has disappeared? Is there a serial killer loose in Modesto?” I, too, thought that another woman had disappeared. After all, the fact that Laci Peterson was missing was hardly new. By the time the front-page story appeared, she had been missing more than two weeks and there had been six other articles about her disappearance in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
As it turned out, there wasn’t a “new woman missing” after all.
Why the headline, then? It was explained, after a fashion, by the fifth paragraph of the Copley News Service story that said: “For the third time in almost four years, residents in this central California farming region are grappling with the horror of a missing woman.”
The first reference was to Chandra Levy. Readers will recall that her disappearance, which made headlines in 2001, was from her home in Washington, D.C. The California connection was that her parents lived in Modesto. The connection to the Laci Peterson case is that Levy’s parents are helping search for the 27-year-old mother-to-be.
The second case of missing women involved a mother and a daughter from Eureka and a friend from Argentina who had been on a sightseeing trip to Yosemite. The Modesto connection? The FBI set up a command post at a local motel to search for them. Their bodies were later found miles away. The connection to the Peterson case is that the volunteer search for the missing pregnant woman is being headquartered out of the same motel the FBI used in the 1999 case.
“I am sure that Modesto suffered when the previous four women disappeared and were found to have been murdered,” Fukushima wrote. But, she added, it’s now common knowledge that none of them was murdered in Modesto. The headline, she said, “might be taken to suggest that something bad is going on right in that city.”
The headline for a story based on mildly interesting but tenuous connections with past sensational cases involving Modesto would have been accurate had it been the first story rather than the seventh story about Peterson’s disappearance.
If you’re going to float a hoax, make it so huge it’s difficult to ignore and do it at a time when there is little other news. That’s a nearly foolproof recipe for getting media attention and causing a frenzy. Clonaid, a company founded by the Raelians, a religious sect, succeeded at it spectacularly last month by claiming it had produced the world’s first cloned baby.
The story, which broke two days after Christmas, appeared below the fold on the front page of the Union-Tribune Dec. 28 with a headline that said: “Cloned baby report greeted warily.” The headline no doubt reflected the ambivalent feelings of editors who thought the story deserved coverage because of the buzz it was creating but who were highly skeptical of its veracity.
The story with a photo of the chief executive of Clonaid shared the front page with three other stories and two other photos.
The Associated Press cloning story was pointed. It said: “Ushering in either a brave new world or a spectacular hoax, a company founded by a religious sect that believes life on Earth was created by extraterrestrials announced yesterday that it has produced the world’s first cloned baby.”
The story also noted no proof or photographic evidence of the birth had been offered. No mother, no child.
The media have come under fire for coverage of the story, but I think the skepticism inherent in the Associated Press article that appeared in this newspaper put the story in proper perspective. In fact, coverage has remained skeptical.
Art Caplan, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is critical of media coverage, but agrees that reporting the story skeptically was correct. Caplan, however, doesn’t think the story even with the buzz it created deserved the front page.
“I think the damage here was not just making people believe in something that did not happen, but politically, it gave those who oppose cloning both for reproduction and research ammunition to ban everything,” Caplan said in a telephone interview. The stories made some people think Clonaid had the ability of “making babies left and right” unless they were immediately stopped from doing so, he said.
It is not a story the media could have ignored. Cloning is in the realm of possibility. The story was properly skeptical. The question remains in my mind whether the story belonged on the front page.
Gina Lubrano’s column commenting on the media appears Mondays. It is the policy of The San Diego Union-Tribune to correct all errors. To discuss accuracy or fairness in the news, please write to Gina Lubrano, readers representative, Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191, or telephone (619) 293-1525. Send e-mail to:
readers.rep@uniontrib.com.
Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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