originalthumbsdown THE HEADLINE: “Toy salesman admits to raping 96 children”

THE STORY: Actually, there isn’t one—not one that’s legitimately relevant to readers in Greater Long Beach … unless they share the same jones for salaciousness (or web site hits) as whatever Press-Telegram editor decided to publish it. The prolific child-raping and score-keeping toy salesman did his dirty work in Jakarta, Indonesia—8,979 miles away from here—usually with street kids he picked up at train stations. Not that our corner of the world isn’t  plagued with the same kind of predatory pervs. And that disturbing fact could be the starting point for a real story, a relevant story, a piece of reporting that provides a public service … you know, if some professional journalist were interested in that kind of thing. But this seven-sentence short—snipped off the AP wire and slapped into the Press-Telegram without meaningful context—recasts a tragedy as a piece of trivia. It emphasizes nothing but the sheer magnitude of its repulsive statistics, pretty much eliminating the sense that the numbers are the sum of young victims and leaving us with nothing to do with that information but marvel at it.