Threatened Innocents and the News: The History of a National Preoccupation Alexandra Meltzer ...

239 Pages·2014·0.56 MB·English

Threatened Innocents and the News: The History of a National Preoccupation

Alexandra Meltzer Goldman

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
under the Executive Committee
of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2014
© 2014
Alexandra Meltzer Goldman
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Threatened Innocents and the News: The History of a National Preoccupation
Alexandra Meltzer Goldman

This dissertation traces the history of media coverage of the “Threatened Innocent” – a
young, often female victim – who has been killed, kidnapped or otherwise endangered. Charting
the evolution of this narrative through the centuries, it contends that these stories are rooted in
the Puritan captivity narratives of the late 1600s, when the kidnapping of Europeans by Indians
was not uncommon. From the establishment of child abuse and kidnapping for ransom as social
problems in the nineteenth century, to the moral panic over child snatching in the 1980s and so-
called Internet predators in more recent years, this dissertation examines the stories that have
created the template for the way we understand Threatened Innocents today.
This dissertation further argues that the power of these stories springs as much from the
language with which they are told and the rhetoric with which they are surrounded as from the
plot points themselves. Since the conservative capture of populism – a decades-long process
completed in the 1980s – stories of Threatened Innocents have successfully yoked together this
quintessentially American narrative with this quintessentially American rhetoric, resulting in a
powerful discourse whose effects are as profound and as they are far-reaching.
Our fixation with stories of Threatened Innocents has, at every turn, wedded narrative
tradition to a sense of national identity and civic responsibility. The overarching contention is
that the stories we tell shape our lives personally and publicly, establishing a social reality that is
often untethered to fact.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv
Chapter One: Introduction ..............................................................................................................1
Chapter Two: Smart, Rowlandson, and Jemison: The Meaning of Captivity .............................13
Chapter Three: Nineteenth Century Childhood ............................................................................46
Chapter Four: Cisneros and Lynch: Wartime Damsels ...............................................................72
Chapter Five: Threatened Innocents and Right Wing Populism ................................................107
Chapter Six: Murdered Pregnant Girls: Formula, Fandom, and Politics ...................................137
Chapter Seven: To Catch A Predator and America’s Most Wanted ...........................................166
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................211
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................221

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Acknowledgements

This dissertation has been a constant in my life when almost nothing else has been. I have
been working on it (sometimes more, sometimes much less) from homes in New York,
Philadelphia, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and now, Boston. Through marriage, the birth of
two babies and the loss of my mother. As difficult as it has sometimes been to carve out the time
to focus and write, I will really miss the stories that I write about here.
First, a big, big thank you to my advisor, Andie Tucher, who has been a constant source
of encouragement, always wise and thoughtful in her edits, and generous with her time. She has
helped me think more clearly about what I want to say, and why. I am grateful to have worked
with her and to have learned from her over the years. Thank you also to Richard John, who
provided pages of detailed and insightful comments, helping me to improve the dissertation
immensely. Todd Gitlin’s work inspired me to pursue this PhD in first place, and his course on
the public sphere animated my approach to the topic of Threatened Innocents. The works of
Michael Schudson and the late James Carey have also informed and provided a framework for
this dissertation.
Thank you to my Miller-Green-Burrows-Wolfson-Meltzer-Hauptman-Goldman family,
who cheered me on every step of the way, and now no doubt have more collective knowledge
about Mary Rowlandson than any family really should. Flo, Bec and Jessica showed incredible
kindness and friendship – and even kept me laughing – during some very dark times. Thank you
especially to Zak, for a level of pushing and nagging that was just high enough without going
over. Thank you to my father, for sending me all those articles and for reading every completed
chapter along the way. And to my in-laws, Laurie and Steve, thank you for giving my two girls
such an incredibly fun time that they never even had time to miss me. Finally, I could not have
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written a page without Kevin. I am grateful for his patience, his super human formatting skills,
and most of all, for never doubting for a minute that we would get here someday.
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Dedication

I dedicate this dissertation to my late, great-aunt Ruthie, who always said, “How’s your
book?” even when it was just a master’s thesis. And to the memory and eternal presence of my
mother – my confidante, my best friend, my other half, my compass, my inspiration to keep on
keeping on. Bird by bird, I did it.

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Chapter One: Introduction

We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the
world we have produced. Alas, there is magic in our self-deceptions.
–James Carey1

On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from a
dilapidated old house in Cleveland, where they had been held prisoner for over ten years. The
story was first reported on May 6th, 2013, and during the initial weeks after the women’s rescue,
it appeared in newspapers across the country and the world and on the front page of People
magazine twice,2 and was a top news item on CNN and all of the major networks. NPR ran
updates on the story every day for the week following the women’s rescue on its programs
Morning Edition, All Things Considered and The Two Way.3
Four years earlier in 2009, Jaycee Dugard, missing for eighteen years, was found alive
while visiting the UC Berkeley campus with her abductor and two daughters born to her in
captivity. Within days of her rescue, Dugard was entered into the pantheon of Threatened
Innocents, a term I will use to denote the particular sorts of victims with which I am concerned in
this dissertation. Other recent well-known victims such as Elizabeth Smart were often invoked in

1 James Carey, Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society, (New York:
Routledge, 1992), p. 30
2 People, “Amazing Escape!” May 11, 2013; People, “Inside Their New Lives,” July 10, 2013
3 http://www.npr.org/templates/archive.php?thingld=182179099, accessed November 20, 2013
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the coverage of the story, their expertise frequently called upon to analyze the story and to
speculate on Jaycee’s emotional state.4
I first became interested in stories of Threatened Innocents in 2003, when, on the evening
of November 9th, two made-for-TV movies, Saving Jessica Lynch and The Elizabeth Smart
Story, competed for network audiences. With their young, white and attractive female
protagonists and their strikingly similar plotlines, these movies vied for viewers by tapping into
the same narrative traditions and appealing to the same cultural wellspring. Both attracted
respectable audiences. Clearly this was something worth investigating.
Stories of Threatened Innocents receive a tremendous amount of media attention, and not
just during slow news weeks. In the week beginning January 14, 2007, the United Nations
reported that there had been more than 34,000 Iraqi civilian deaths in the past year, and President
Bush made the rounds on the interview circuit in order to sell to a disheartened electorate his
“surge” plan to increase the number of troops sent to Afghanistan. According to the news index
at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, these two Iraq-related stories combined filled just
20% of the total newshole. The second place story, filling 8% of the total newshole, was that of
the discovery and rescue of two missing Missouri boys, 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck and 13-
year-old Ben Ownby. Cable news devoted 15% of total airtime that week to coverage of the
story, second only to the Iraq policy debate, which received 18% of total airtime.5
The story of the boys’ rescue broke on January 12th. Ben Ownby had been kidnapped
after getting off a school bus in front of his house in a rural Missouri town. Police followed up on

4 “AC360 Interview: Elizabeth Smart and Her Father, Ed,” Anderson Cooper 360, CNN.
Accessed November 16, 2013, http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/27/360-interview-ed-smart-
and-his-daughter-elizabeth/
5 Project for Excellence in Journalism, News Coverage Index: Jan 14-19, 2007
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a tip given by Ownby’s next-door neighbor, and four days later the boy was discovered alive at
the apartment of a 40-year-old pizza shop manager named Michael Devlin. There, police also
found 15 year-old Shawn Hornbeck, missing since October of 2002. Shawn had been held
captive by Devlin for over four years, mere miles from his home in Richwoods, MO. In the
weeks that followed, new updates on the captor and the captive boys – and particularly Shawn
Hornbeck – appeared on the CNN homepage on a daily – and sometimes even hourly – basis.
Between January 12th and March 14th, there were 176 stories on the national news wires. The
case was the subject of such talk shows as Larry King Live and Oprah, and was also People
magazine’s cover story for its issue of January 29th with the emphatic headline “Found!”
The ongoing saga of Threatened Innocents has become so much a part of the fabric of our
culture – the background buzz of anxiety over which we operate our everyday lives – that it is
difficult not to take these stories’ continual presence on the national media radar for granted or to
see their prevalence as somehow natural or unremarkable. And yet the emotional interest these
stories generate is wildly disproportionate to the actual incidence of the crimes.
The question I want to ask is, why? What is it about this story that reaches beyond the
victims’ families and immediate communities to have resonance with an entire nation? What
happened to these boys was horrific, a nightmare and a tragedy for their families and friends and
communities. But the truth is that terrible things happen to innocent people all the time. Innocent
people are felled by accidents, epidemics and war, and we, as a nation, rarely hear about their
individual stories – let alone become wholly immersed in them.
And yet, we are so familiar with Threatened Innocents. Laci, Elizabeth, Chandra, Jaycee:
these are household names. We are fluent in the language of these stories, and with the named
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