There was a kidnapper prowling my neighborhood? My heart raced as I read my social media feed. A local mother described a terrifying event. Her child was walking home from school when a vehicle pulled up and offered the student a ride. The kid, not recognizing the car or driver, ran away as fast as possible.
Within minutes the post about the attempted abduction was being shared everywhere. My phone buzzed as friends texted me the warning. Did I see the post about the kidnapping? Did I hear the news?
Perhaps it would be better to put “news” in quotation marks. It turns out that nothing malicious had happened at all. As the Edmonds Police Department announced after a thorough investigation, the whole story was based on a misunderstanding.
What had really happened was that there were two children walking along the street. A parent who often drove child No. 1 home offered the student a ride and child No. 2 got scared and ran away.
Yes, this was a great opportunity to talk about stranger danger, but it was also an example of why social media and word-of-mouth reporting is not, nor can it ever be, true journalism.
Coincidentally, the very next day my daughter’s fourth-grade teacher was doing a language arts project with the classroom and asked the children how many of them had read a newspaper before. According to my daughter, she was the only person who raised her hand. I double-checked with her teacher, who told me that most of the students didn’t know what a newspaper section was.
Probably some of my fellow fourth-grade parents have online subscriptions to The Daily Herald or The Seattle Times. A digital Herald subscription is four weeks for 99 cents and then $8.95 a month. It costs 30 cents a day to be well-informed. But children losing familiarity with the newspaper is something that scares me.
We are raising a generation of Americans that places their faith in social media instead of vetted journalists.
In 2004, there were about 16 reporters covering lawmakers in Olympia, but now there are only six. Where are our tax dollars going? How can we solve homelessness? Why are our roads in such poor condition? I don’t rely on social media to answer any of these questions for me, but I do open up my newspaper every morning looking for answers.
Newspaper subscribers keep journalism alive, and the free press is the bedrock of American democracy. It matters to all voters — red and blue — to support local papers.
Those of us who are already subscribers can teach our children and grandchildren to read the comics while they eat breakfast. We can buy subscriptions as gifts for family members and kindly remind them why the Founding Fathers and Mothers of our country valued a free press.
Scrolling through Facebook for funny memes and cute baby pictures is great. But the next time my heart races over a news story, I want it to be news, not “news.”
Jennifer Bardsley publishes books under her own name and the pseudonym Louise Cypress. Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, on Twitter @jennbardsley or on Facebook as The YA Gal. Email her at teachingmybabytoread@gmail.com.
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