Oh, lordie, they're at it again.

If you've ever wondered why people hate the media in the United States--why journalists consistently rank right down there with politicians as the least respected and least trusted of our "learned" professions--forget ideological bias. Forget the left's claims that "corporate media" is hopelessly biased toward conservative policies, especially economic; or conservatives' charges that the "liberal media" is corrupting our nation with its permissive, destructive social agenda. It is, and it is. But the worst sins of our info-tainment culture have nothing to do with political ideology. And even before the current glut of 9/11 bathos, they've been on full display this summer, every time another small child disappears or another tiny body is found on prime time.

The most recent sensational footage came from Oregon City, where a man arrested for the murders of two neighbor girls--here's a nice, grisly, titillating touch--is the son of a serial killer on death row for murdering young women. (Not every boy benefits from having a male role model in his life.) A community grieves, soon to be forgotten; next week it'll be Atlanta, or maybe Louisville, just like it's already been Orange County and Philadelphia and the Bay Area and Salt Lake City and the list goes on.

Especially after last spring's predator fad--pedophiles in the priesthood--you'd think there was an epidemic of strangers out there, obsessed 24/7 with preying on our nation's vulnerable youth. This, of course, is nonsense. Many of the priest abuse allegations are 20 years old, but they're played (and playing) in the news like they happened yesterday. And the number of children who are actually kidnapped, raped, and/or killed by strangers in the United States is appallingly high by global standards, but much lower than people think--out of 70 million or so minors, we're talking fewer than one in 100,000 each year. The huge numbers peddled by "Missing Children" outfits are vastly inflated by counting kids taken by competing parents in custody battles--familial tragedies, to be sure, but hardly the stuff of John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy.

Yet that's still more than a case a day, plenty of chances for an opportunistic media pack, cameras and tape recorders in claws, to descend like bipedal locusts upon one or another grief-stricken family which may or may not want the attention. There's something just plain icky about this sort of exploitation, the same sort of ickiness that comes from our daily e-mail invitations to "REAL bestiality" or "Authentic Oriental Incest!," as though it looks a whole lot different in Manila than it does in suburban Cleveland. There's an appetite for this sort of stuff. Pornographers know it, and so do television executives, who know that if a viewer isn't interested in imagining themselves as a grief-stricken parent, hey, maybe they'll get off on imagining the other part.

It's disgusting--of a piece with the soft porn in the back of alternative weeklies (media outlets which provide some of my income); the less subtle titillation of morning radio shows that invite 12-year-old girls to describe their rape fantasies--live, on the air, in sickeningly graphic detail; and the even more explicit pornography--not to be confused with erotica--that somehow, in recent years, went from being a tolerated (or not) societal nuisance to being a celebrated and supposedly respectable industry. Feminist arguments that women were harmed by the making of such stuff lost currency, undone both by other women's claims of sexual liberation and by technology that could simulate anything a live woman (or man, or child, or beast) wouldn't or couldn't cooperate with.

What's left is objectification and the more difficult to prove but impossible to deny--on the basis of sheer common sense--notion that it's a bad idea to train men, and women, and boys, and girls, to view women (and young women, and older children, and younger children, on a progressively icier slope) as primarily collections of ownable body parts, as objects of sexual conquest. Is it any wonder teens and even pre-teens act out sexually in a way unimaginable a generation ago, when they're bombarded from birth with such images? We don't read about that too much, because sexual objectification (of guys, too, in the last decade) is used to sell every imaginable product capitalism can produce in all its inglorious excess. Sex sells, and ad agencies know it. Programmers, too. And news editors.

What does any of this have to do with news coverage? Well, titillation should have nothing at all to do with news, but it does, of course, due to the commercial imperative to draw and hold an audience. As "news" on every type of news outlet--not just television--gets selected more and more frequently for that ability, and less and less for its actual newsworthiness, several things happen.

First, fetishizing crimes against kids teaches people to hate the media, for feeding them crap--even if it's crap we willingly, happily watch or read. (It's easier to hate the messenger than to hate ourselves.)

Secondly, it obscures the real news, creating diversions that preoccupy the citizens of our pseudo-democracy while abominations occur daily behind closed, and open, doors of power. Bread and circuses, baby. The people ripping us off may thunder at sex and violence in our media, but it works for them very nicely, thank you much.

Thirdly, and most importantly, it terrifies us--or inspires us to depravity--or both. Either way, our children suffer the most. Most crimes against kids come not from strangers, but people already in their lives: parents, step-parents, relatives, parents' friends, neighbors. Encouraging children to fear strangers--to the point not simply of sensible precautions, but of paranoia--is one of the factors that has led to the loss of free play time in our kids' lives, especially in our cities. Parents instead have, more and more, been opting for structured activities--soccer leagues, music lessons, and the like--and children lose important opportunities to, well, be children. And to interact with different types of people, and in less controlled environments. We lose an important type of community. Kids are taught, at a too-early age, to be fearful of others not like them, and both kids and parents are less likely to be aware of where the dangers are actually most likely to be lurking.

All that, just to boost ratings. And it does, indeed, boost ratings (and thus sell more ads at a higher price). The tableau of a stranger preying on our defenseless children reaches our emotions in a primal way far beyond logic or reason.

But who's going to defend our kids from the impact of such media stories themselves?