Priorties

If you read the Chicago Sun-Times on a regular basis, or occasionally the Chicago Tribune, if you watched television news in the Chicago area, you would come to the conclusion that the most important event in the past month in the entire country, on the whole planet, is the disappearance of Stacy Peterson.

She vanished from her home about a month ago leaving two young children - and a husband about thirty years older than she. She was his fourth wife, and the third died under what the media are making out to be suspicious circumstances.

Not since Lacy Peterson’s disappearance or the O.J. Simpson trial have domestic difficulties made so much splash.

Search teams from Texas arrived and conducted mass searches. The Illinois State Police declared her disappearance the most important investigation in the state, perhaps the country. People Magazine has put her putative husband, Drew Peterson, a now-retired local cop, on its cover, and he seems to relish the oats he munches at the media trough.

In the spring, another woman, Lisa Stebic, disappeared from her suburban Chicago home, and she too has yet to appear dead or alive. In fact, Drew Peterson and Craig Stebic, the ostensibly bereaved husbands, have, according to ubiquitous media reports, become fast friends. On the other hand, it may be that no one else understands their plight and they joined together in a common bond. Lisa Stebic’s disappearance drew almost as much publicity as Stacy Peterson’s.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea that a woman, or in this case, women, vanish, leaving their families, is tragic. That they may have been murdered, abducted, violated, all are terrifying, and cause me to double check the locks on the doors each night. But I don’t believe their disappearances deserve so much media coverage. If their husbands did away with them, and that’s a big if, and if they are arrested, another big if, there is no place in the entire Midwest either one will be able to get a fair trial. I suspect Drew Peterson knows that and has become the media’s darling as some kind of a ploy.

But none of that matters in light of the fact that we have our priorities wrong.

This has been the year of biggest casualties in Iraq, buried somewhere in the newspaper. President Bush has the opportunity to take a stand on a Palestinian State with the conflicting parties meeting this week at a summit, but that too is buried. We are in the midst of an overly long presidential campaign, and it’s important that we scrutinize each candidate to choose the best one so we don’t end up in four or eight years in the same mess we’re in now. In Chicago a couple of weeks ago, a fourteen year African American old girl disappeared on the way home from visiting her mother in the hospital. She turned up almost two weeks later, but the media pretty much ignored her. We seem to be headed for a recession, despite the Black Friday and Cyber Monday bunkum we see on the news. Scandals proliferate at the Cook County level (so what else is new?) and in the City of Chicago (although Mayor Daley seems to be surviving them).

Unfortunately, television news, and to a large extent struggling print media, have become mere entertainment for the masses. All these important events swirl around us and instead of being thoughtful citizens, we have become total air heads. The media say they give us what we apparently want, but I don’t believe that’s their responsibility. TomKat’s baby and Brittney Spears latest automobile hit-and-run are not as important as the war in Iraq, the possible invasion of Iran, or the current summit. Given the opportunity, I believe the American public will rise to a more serious, thoughtful level.

The news media must stop treating us as slack-jawed yokels, stop lowering expectations to the lowest common denominator. Give us, instead, something to ruminate on, something of importance.