Media overkill is more frightening than the real thing.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Words & Images - Column

YOU WAKE UP ONE MORNING suddenly sure your child is suffering from bipolarity, or you're convinced you're suffering from chronic anxiety because it's becoming a national problem. You're afraid of swimming in the ocean because it is "the summer of the shark." You're sure your child is part of the most spoiled generation ever, guilty, according to a newsmagazine cover, of demonstrating out-of-control behavior and gross excess. You're petrified of sending your teenager to public school because you're convinced some troubled kid is going to go berserk and kill everyone in the classroom.

It isn't a coincidence that these fears grip the public. The national media splash these stories on the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers, and then the broadcast media regurgitate them until Mom and Dad fear for their children's lives.

Sharks? One expert says that more people have been killed by dogs than sharks in the last 100 years. Shark attacks, emphasized in Time magazine's scary cover headline "Summer of the Shark," were about the same as the previous year. All of this was largely ignored as the "Jaws"-like picture lunged at the reader, white teeth cutting through the ocean wave, urging readers to stay out of the water if they valued their lives.

Teenage killers? Time and Newsweek splashed the Columbine "Massacre in Colorado" and subsequent incidents on their covers and followed these up with special reports on "How to Spot a Troubled Kid" and "Another School, Another Shooting," and the same questions come back to haunt us with even greater force: What marks the teens who take out their frustrations with such violence? What can politicians do to stop the carnage? Parents across the country panicked, many keeping their children home from school out of fear and outrage. But the experts tried to point out over the media blitz that an American child has only one chance in 2,000,000 of getting killed while at school. The experts added, "With those odds, a student has a greater chance of being exterminated by a stray comet that wipes out the Earth." (One magazine recently voiced concern about that stray comet headed for Earth with scientists having little time to figure out how to stop it from destroying the planet.)

What most readers and viewers forget is that one of the definitions of news is that it is a unique or special event, an uncommon occurrence. That is what makes news dramatic and emotional. As a responsible "ABC News" report by...