Lately, though, it has seemed as though "Wilson Buys New Tractor" would be a good bet to make the top story on cnn.com. It isn't as if it's been a slow period for real news. The US is still involved in a couple of wars, for instance, and there's a fresh scandal afoot now that it's been revealed that American soldiers have been torturing innocent taxi drivers to death in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, an uprising against the sadistic Karimov regime in Uzbekistan was bloodily put down, raising questions about why the same Bush Administration that goes on and on about ending tyranny has allied itself with a government known to boil prisoners to death. And then back on the home front there's been a drive to change the basic nature of the Senate's role in the US government. Yet cnn.com's top story on Monday morning was about a girl in Florida being rescued from a landfill where she'd been dumped after being raped.

This is no aberration. Last week, cnn.com's top story was a couple of missing kids in Idaho. The week before that, it was a couple of kids in Illinois getting stabbed to death. Before that, whoo-hoo, runaway bride! And then before that you had Jessica Lunsford and before that Terri Schiavo and Laci Peterson and Dru Sjodin and Elizabeth Smart and Jessica Lynch and on and on. One small mercy is that at least my exposure to these stories has been online, where news items are delivered in parallel rather than in serial, so I can sift through them in a few seconds. On the TV version of CNN, if you want to find out what's going on in the world, you have to sit through hours of blather about stories that by rights ought to be relegated to the local news section of the paper along with the other murders and missing children. And of course CNN isn't alone in this sort of thing. Fox News gives just as much airtime to these sorts of stories and adds swoopy whooshy graphics and anchors screaming "COME ON!" to add to the pain. Which leads to the question... why?

The conspiracy theory is that the media deliberately pushes these stories to distract the public from real news that would enrage people if they knew about it. You know, like Karl Rove, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch meet up in Dick Cheney's undisclosed location and hash out which little girl to throw down a well in lieu of covering the deteriorating situation in Iraq or the impact of the latest congressional bill or what have you. The thing is, while this sort of thing does happen — This American Life had an amazing story a while back about the ADM price-fixing scandal, complete with tape of the heads of every lysine producer in the world meeting around a table — what Noam Chomsky and others have tried to point out for years is that you don't need a conspiracy for the media to end up serving the interests of the powerful. Media conglomerates simply follow the dictates of market forces and the result looks like a conspiracy. CNN and Fox News no more need to conspire to distract viewers from the failures of the Bush Administration than two weights dropped off the Tower of Pisa need to conspire to hit the ground at the same time.

But let's look at this a little more closely. The basic argument here is that the corporate media depends on advertising to make a profit. Therefore, big media outlets avoid extensive coverage of stories that (a) make big business look bad, because that's where the advertisers are; (b) might anger powerful groups like the Christian right that would pass their concerns along to advertisers; or (c) make the government look bad, since losing access to the corridors of power is a great way for a news organization to be marginalized, making it harder to get advertisers. This analysis may well be spot-on. But it seems to me that none of this would be an issue if high-quality coverage of serious news actually got ratings. It doesn't. People just don't tune in to learn about Enron and Uzbekistan. But evidently they do tune in for runaway brides — and in such numbers that the cable news execs judge it more profitable to split the runaway bride audience several ways than to offer up an alternative lead story and have the audience for that story all to themselves.

So if it's not a huge mystery why CNN and Fox News and the like assail us with this sort of thing, the question becomes why people lap it up. Why do people care more about some random woman a thousand miles away getting stabbed than about pending legislation whose provisions are likely to directly affect the lives of nearly every American? Why do they line up to buy "Support Our Troops" magnets for the back of their cars but don't want to hear about what those troops are actually up to? I have to think that a lot of it comes down to education. A lot of people learn little or nothing about economics, government, world history, even geography — the subjects most important in making sense of the world, and not coincidentally, those that the current regime's education program is squeezing out of the curriculum. And our anti-intellectual culture assures that kids are bombarded with the notion that these subjects are boring, so even people who might have no trouble understanding them often don't pursue them. So they hear about the latest twist in the Social Security debate or hear about the end of the filibuster and change the channel. But a girl kidnapped from her bedroom? That's something anyone can understand, even if it has no real impact on anyone outside that girl's community.

Until recently, that was about as deeply as I'd thought about the issue. (To recap, since the preceding discussion has been pretty rambly: American news organizations play up individual cases of murder, kidnapping and the like as national news. They do this partially because media corporations consider it safer to do this than to air stories that might cause people to question the status quo, but primarily because they get better ratings this way. They get better ratings this way because the American educational system is a shambles that leaves very few interested in or even capable of comprehending anything more complex or abstract than a single, easily understandable tragedy.) But over the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about it further.

One objection I've heard to the media's selection of crimes to fixate upon is that almost invariably the victims are white, rich and telegenic. This, while lamentable, isn't very interesting. The viewers are mostly white, and the executives disproportionately so, so they relate more to crimes involving white people (even though the victims of violent crime are disproportionately minorities). Richer victims tend to be the ones whose families have the resources to bring their cases to the attention of the press. And if pretty people didn't attract higher ratings than ugly ones, the casts of most TV shows would look a lot different. But there is one element of the media's selection of stories that I'd never really thought about, perhaps because it's just so obvious:

All these stories are about girls!

Why?

80% of American murder victims are male. Boys get kidnapped. Why don't CNN and Fox News obsess about them? Why is it nearly always girls or barely post-adolescent women?

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed or wounded in Iraq. Why did 19-year-old Jessica Lynch get all the press?

Many families have had to wrestle over the issue of when to end life support for a family member. Why the uproar over Terri Schiavo? Would this case have received a moment of national airtime had it been Terence Schiavo whose parents were trying to stop his wife from allowing him to die? Or even if she were sixty instead of an infantilized 41, represented on television by pictures from twenty years ago?

There've been any number of stories of American troops committing war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Few people have heard about the Ilario Pantano case. The story of Dilawar the taxi driver was greeted with a shrug. Why was the one story of prisoner abuse to gain any traction Abu Ghraib — and only after 21-year-old Lynndie England was cast in the starring role?

Hell, we can go back to 1987 and the archetypal example of this phenomenon: Jessica McClure. In the years since then, her case has been referenced in "The Simpsons" and the movie Twelve Monkeys — yet both adaptations rang false, because they both made it a boy who fell down the well. And I can't think of too many boys not named Elian who have attracted this sort of media attention. We generally save the hysteria for the sugar and spice set.

America is a girl country. While countries like China and India have sex ratios wildly unbalanced in favor of males, partly because of Hepatitis B (as noted by Emily Oster) but largely due to female infanticide and abortion, the reports I've read from American clinics offering sex selection indicate that American couples ask for girls by margins of anywhere from 3:1 to 13:1. (Japan also favors girls.) Admittedly, these figures are probably skewed by the fact that the technology for producing girls is slightly more reliable than that for producing boys. But I've heard the same thing in reports about couples looking to adopt. In most of the world, daughters are viewed as a burden. By contrast, in the US they are increasingly considered just as capable as boys of carrying the family name into the next generation, in spirit if not literally. They can become breadwinners, take over and run the family business, grow up to be president. And they're considered by many parents to be more cooperative as children, less likely to cause trouble, and easier to bond with. Also, they rule, whereas boys, my sources tell me, drool. This jibes with my own experience as well.

So it's fascinating to see the transformation of America into a girl country accompanied by the media freaking out about damsels in distress. These sorts of cultural anxiety attacks rarely have much basis in reality; a few years ago, for instance, news outlets made it sound as though public schools were war zones, when in fact violence on campus had plunged. Similarly, there has been no actual upswing in murder and abduction rates among young American females. So what is it that our national psyche is working through by cathecting onto girls getting kidnapped and raped and killed? Is it merely that we're adjusting to the fact that our womenfolk are no longer confined to the home and are thus subject to the dangers of the great wide world? Or is it something more? A while ago my friend Rob mentioned having seen Dennis Miller on TV talking about Terri Schiavo. Miller, in the aftermath of 9/11, became a Bush Administration sycophant, declaring that his political views had changed now that terrorists were trying to kill him. (I've heard the same sort of language elsewhere — author Robert Ferrigno told Slate that he was supporting Bush because he was willing to kill "the people who want to kill my children.") Rob reported that Miller used the same language in talking about Schiavo, arguing that (despite the fact that her brain had liquefied) she must be in a panic, thinking, "Help! I can't move and they're trying to kill me!" So is that it, perhaps? When people watch the parade of girls assaulted by loved ones or malevolent strangers, do they see in them our girl country under attack by a coalition of former allies and countries most of them know nothing about?

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