It's a rare occasion when news stories about various murders, assaults, disappearances and near-deaths of young people in Tempe do not smatter our news feeds every morning. Every week it seems a new violent act, whether shrouded in mystery or not, has shaken part of the community.
How could we forget about Jack Culolias, an ASU student, Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge, beloved son and friend to many, whose body was found in Tempe Town Lake last December? Or, yet more recently, how could we ignore the seemingly violent murder of Annovedwin Begay, a 23-year-old woman whose body was found in the middle of a Tempe street just weeks ago?
These are the accounts we idly scroll through every day — but it seems our interest is held more in the grotesque details of these stories rather than the impact consumption of these narratives should have on us.
Often, the most gruesome and gory stories garner the most attention, while those that remain unresolved, like that of 19-year-old Adrienne Salinas who went missing nearly a month ago, lose their audience. Shouldn't we pay special attention to stories about missing people? The tragedy of death is surely horrific, but the news media's first calling is to inform the community; this requires a receptive community willing to devote more than a few meager seconds of their morning routine to their fellow man or woman.
We're prone to bouncing through the "related stories" sections of news websites, picking the most bloody headlines to peruse. Don't let a headline of a missing person slip by without careful inspection. It takes community effort to piece together a mysterious disappearance, like that of Salinas, second by second, hopefully ensuring the safe return of the person who went missing.
It's almost as if maybe we've conditioned ourselves through all those late-night Law & Order sessions to bounce from violent narrative to violent narrative, moving on from those that lose their drama or excitement. Those news stories aren't around to entertain us. They're there to inform us, to ask for each reader to consider for just one moment whether they might have a missing piece to the intricate puzzle that could be the few minutes or hours in which someone vanished into thin air.
It's our unspoken, ethical duty to protect those in danger. Paying closer attention to missing persons stories rather than skipping over them for the most recent tale of battery or the next fatal pile up on the Interstate 10 is one way to do just that.
There's a saying in the journalism field that "if it bleeds, it leads" — meaning, the more gore, the more page views a story will prompt. This caters to the broad human fascination with death that makes us curious enough to click on a headline about a double homicide in the first place. While that curiosity will remain, it's crucial that we prioritize our attentions into lifting each other up as a community rather than watching each other fall.
We don't need to be patrons to disaster voyeurism.
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