The History of a National Preoccupation Alexandra Meltzer
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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 i 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 ii 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. iii 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. iv 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 1 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 2 a tip given by Ownby’s next-door neighbor, and four days later the boy was discovered alive at the apartment of