When good guys lie: misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place.

• Author: Hodges, Glenn
• Position: Baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns

I thought I'd seen it all when parents started leading their kids around by leashes in the shopping mall. Then a woman and her leashless toddler came into the shoe store where I worked. The little boy walked a few feet away from his mother, to look at a shoe or something, and his mother shrieked, "Get back here! Some man's gonna snatch you!" Terrified, the boy ran and wrapped his arms around his mother's leg. He was safe.

It was 1984, the apex of the missing children scare. Fifty thousand children a year were being abducted by strangers, we were told - equivalent to three per state every day - from shopping malls and front yards, bus stops and playgrounds. Parents were fingerprinting their kids and engraving ID numbers into their teeth. Insurance companies offered abduction insurance. The Sharper Image sold bright yellow transmitters so parents could track their stolen kids.

Then, in 1985, the Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize for showing the whole thing was a hoax. The real number of stranger abductions was, at most, a tenth what everyone was claiming, and stereotypical kidnappings (incidents where children were not quickly released) were probably closer to two or three hundred a year. Most missing kids - roughly 95 percent - were runaways; almost all the rest had been "abducted" by non-custodial parents.

The 50,000 figure began with John Walsh, father of a six-year-old boy whose 1981 kidnapping thrust the issue of missing children into prime time (literally - the 1983 TV movie "Adam" probably did as much to elevate abduction hysteria as anything else). After Walsh testified in a congressional hearing that "50,000 children disappear annually and are abducted by strangers for reasons of foul play," it became the statistic of record. Missing children advocates, the news media, members of Congress - all cited it as fact.

Where did Walsh get the number? It was a "guesstimate." He said he concocted it after talking to missing children organizations across the country. He wasn't much of a statistician, but he sure knew how to get attention. "No child is safe from the sick, sadistic molesters and killers who roam our country at random," he said. Now Walsh is the host of "America's Most Wanted."

By the spring of 1986, pictures of missing kids had appeared on three billion milk cartons. They must have had a hard time finding enough children who had actually been abducted; I remember seeing pictures of "children" who were over 18 when reported missing and well into their twenties by the time they joined me for cereal. That struck me as ridiculous and a little funny; seeing that toddler clutch his mother in terror did not. In 1987, a Roper poll found that 76 percent of American children feared, above all else, being kidnapped.

Now, more than ten years after the number has been thoroughly debunked, the scare lives on. Companies still offer kidnapping insurance; parents and children still eye strangers with suspicion. A child told ABC News in 1994, "I don't like strangers. I'm afraid they're going to shoot me or something, or poison me."

When it comes to the shaping of policy debates, misinformation is all too common, and most of us know it. We have learned that half the stuff that comes down the pike is agenda-driven, misleading, and often flat-out wrong. But we tend to reserve our critical faculties for those we already mistrust. When the Heritage Foundation says $5.3 trillion has been spent on welfare since the sixties, or when Philip Morris says cigarettes are not addictive and don't cause cancer, we recognize the agenda and judge accordingly. But where we have sympathies, we lack skepticism. Why did a baseless statistic for abducted children run unchallenged for years, dragging policy-makers and public attention along by the collar? Because no one's for child abduction.

Most issues break down along some sort of ideological lines, and both liberals and conservatives tend to trust their own. Those of us on the middle to left side of the political spectrum are apt to trust environmentalists, social service advocates and other left-leaning crusaders to give us the straight dope. That may not be wise. We assume that noble ends inspire noble means, but that is not necessarily the case. The noblest war can inspire acts just as gruesome as the most debauched land grab.

It is important to realize that when someone has an agenda - and who in Washington doesn't? - information is tactical, and very malleable, material. And when the cause seems most important and urgent, the temptation is high for researchers, interest groups, policy makers, and the media to exaggerate problems and distort findings to attract attention and force action.

Bait and Switch

Outright invention, like Walsh's kidnapping number, is rare in the policy arena; it's too easy to rebut. What's much more common is deceptive labeling of arguably accurate data.

Every fall People for the American Way releases a report called "Attacks on the Freedom to Learn," which purports to highlight the growing problem of censorship in America's public schools. In tandem with the American Library Association's "Banned Books Week," PFAW is the source of scores of news stories on how closed-minded parents and religious zealots are targeting our best literature - Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Catcher in the Rye - for elimination from public school libraries and reading lists. PFAW's press release this fall exclaimed that "Public education weathered a recordbreaking 475 attacks on curricula, library and textbooks, student expression, and other components of public education in the 1995-96 school year."

But what PFAW classifies as an incident of "attempted censorship" is a single complaint, usually from a parent, who in many cases thinks a certain book is inappropriate for his or her child's age group. Most of the books PFAW describes as threatened have had no more than a half-dozen complaints nationwide, and it's not necessarily the classics that are drawing the most ire.

In the 1994-1995 school year, according to PFAW's 1995 report, the two most frequently challenged books in US. schools were Alvin Schwam's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which include tales like "Wonderful Sausage," about a butcher who gets such culinary raves for his ground-up wife that he embarks on a town-wide sausage-making rampage, collecting children and, for good measure, "their kittens and puppies." But the report's 30-page introduction, which winds up being the main source for news stories, makes no mention of Schwartzs books. Meanwhile, Of Mice and Men and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings get four mentions each. It's a classic bait-and-switch. When you think of censorship, you don't imagine a university professor complaining that his first-grader is too young to read stories about murder and dismemberment.

Distorting the debate over what is or isn't suitable reading material for children certainly has its repercussions, but the most tangible consequence is probably extra checks from direct mail solicitations (PFAW's annual "censorship" report is a fundraising...