MSNBC Correspondent Rides Around Parking Lot Gabbing About Teen Car Surfing, Sex Trafficking Story Ignored
Somewhere in the bowels of the MSNBC newsroom, a decision was made
on Tuesday to devote considerable coverage to getting to the bottom of a
disconcerting juvenile epidemic: car surfing.
That's right, the "fearless gamble" that is "all the rage" among
American teenagers, according to NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders,
is an important enough story for a national cable news network to send
one of its intrepid reporters to give live reports throughout the
morning and into the mid-afternoon.
While the topic of car surfing received substantial coverage on Jansing & Co. with Chris Jansing, News Live with Contessa
Brewer, and News Nation with Tamron Hall, the recent sting operation
that uncovered employees at a New York City Planned Parenthood office
offering advice to a man posing as a pimp who admitted to exploiting
minors as sex slaves received but a scant 30-second news brief during
the 10 a.m. hour of Jansing & Co.
"I've never heard of this before," confessed Jansing. "What exactly is car surfing?"
Sanders, reporting live while driving himself in circles around a
parking lot in Florida, explained to Jansing that car surfing is
"dangerous," "illegal," and "obscure," but that throngs of teens are
dying in pursuit of this "fearless gamble."
All death is tragic, but let's put MSNBC's abundance of car-surfing
coverage and dearth of human-trafficking coverage into perspective.
According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, which
Sanders cited in his report, there were a total of 99 cases
of car-surfing injuries identified in American newspapers from 1990 to
2008. On the other hand, the 2006 US Department of State Trafficking in
Persons Report estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked in the United States annually.
Instead of covering a tragedy that afflicts thousands of people each
year, MSNBC opted to investigate an "obscure" fools' errand that hasn't
harmed 100 people in the past 20 years.
"Is it okay to drive and do TV at the same time?" asked a smirking Jansing.
Perhaps a more appropriate question to ask would be: is it okay for a
national news correspondent to be giving live reports behind the wheel
of a moving vehicle on a story about teens doing stupid things with
moving vehicles, at the expense of investigating allegations that a
nationally-renowned abortion clinic is complicit in helping people who
admit to selling minors for sex?
A transcript of Chris Jansing's news brief on the Planned Parenthood scandal can be found below:
MSNBC
Jansing & Co.
February 8, 2011
10:14 a.m. EST
An anti-abortion group called Live Action says its undercover cameras caught big problems at a New York City Planned Parenthood office. The man in it poses as a pimp and asks for help for underage sex workers. Live Action insists the video shows that employees at Planned Parenthood are willing to help people who sexually exploit minors. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America said it will retrain its employees on how to deal with situations like this.
-Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.
