[shadowfyr]

See, that is missing the point entirely. The issue isn't it being a myth. Its not. The issue is intentional exaggeration, intentional misinterpretation of the actual facts, and the intentional use of both to lie about who, how many and how often, for the express purpose of claiming that the world has millions of scary freaks in it, but you can be saved from them, if you only listen to their suggestions, pass their laws and force their narrow minded ideas of morality and education down everyone's throats. See the difference?

You can't fight a real problem if you have a mixture of well meaning paranoids and ill meaning radicals making up imaginary enemies for you to chase for them **instead** of figuring out why the problems really exist, how to fix them, and who is **really** going to either take advantage of the problems for personal gain or actually commit the acts. Cops have to deal with this every time they have a case. They say, "We need some info on a robbery that happened on X day, in X city at X store.", and for the next week they get thousands of idiots calling in tips. One of them *might* know something useful, but the rest are seeing imaginary boogie men, trying to make themselves look like heroes, while knowing nothing, or think it might be their neighbor's aunt's garner, because they never liked the way he trimmed the rose bushes. The problem here is, when it comes to some issues, the people pushing for the guilt of thousands of innocent people have special dispensation to not only not have what they say questioned adequately, but to have those imaginary enemies named on national TV, or printed in news papers. You can't challenge *why* they think its wrong, because you would be attacking their faith, you can't ask the government to do anything about it, because, when they are not in collusion with them, they are not allowed to interfere with them (never mind that colluding with them is already interference), and millions of people tune into programs that their leaders run, to listen to them tell them in detail how all those statistics are not only true, but that its actually *worse* than reported, because there is a conspiracy to stop the truth from being known, and so on.

If these people pulled this BS in some countries, where separation was not so strict, they would have their broadcast licenses pulled. Even suggesting that this might be acceptable in the US would get you smeared so badly, that if you didn't already work in some meaningless position, you would be hard pressed to work at a McDonald's after, assuming some nut didn't manage to pass a law allowing them to jail or deport you for it (one would hope not, but given some of the recent riders on bills passed, like the one adding like 10 million or something to "Intelligent Design" research <where is that taking place exactly again, someone's basement under a crack house?> by the senate, its not impossible that they will, or have already, tried. Nor is it unlikely that another president, like the one we have, which has already stated that "some" people shouldn't be allowed to call themselves Americans or be considered citizens, would sign it if it landed on their desk.).

These people don't play fair. They cheat 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the time... they probably listen to voices in their heads, telling them to cheat more. The rest of us, sadly, are gifted, or cursed, with a conscience and ethics, which doesn't allow us to sink to their level, even when we have a few hundred tiny psychological studies, and they have 50 published books (which could all be condensed into 30 pages of drivel) and 50,000 news articles, where the "reporter" chose to be "fair and balanced" by lending equal time and credence to both the real facts, and what ever paranoid delusional crank they could find under the nearest rock, to present the "alternative" view. In the modern US, ignorance **is** not just a point of view, its considered a valuable one, to be placed on equal terms with real facts, when reported by virtually the entire press.

Mind you, it cuts both ways. I have, on more than a few occasions, seen the opposite disturbing result, where, confronted with someone trying to present a conservative view, the paper/news agency has opted to find the closest rock, under which some famous crank from the left is sitting.

We are not expected to believe 50 impossible things at the same time (or how ever the saying goes), but more often its simply expected that if there are 49 impossible things and one possible one, the press must pick one of the 49 to contrast it to the one true thing, hand picked to push the buttons of the expected audience, so that they don't notice the other 48 impossibilities at all (those being the purview of *other* news sources with different audiences. I, and many others, are getting rather annoyed by it. And its not something you would have gotten back during Watergate, or any other "previous" generations of news reporting, unless you mean the middle ages, where the news was probably, if printed at all, done so at the bequest, or anger if not to their liking, of the local noble.