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Scour the news about online child predators, and you’ll hear that sexual predators are everywhere, increasing in number, and ready to lure your child. Take this local CBS news website headline: “Internet Crimes Increase, While Law Enforcement Budgets Decrease.” One number that has been repeated on network news is that “50,000 predators” are trolling the Internet at any given time, a number quoted by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. But a new study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire concludes that while there has been a significant increase in the number of arrests of young adult sex offenders, overall sex crimes against children have declined nationally. The increase in arrests is the result of more enforcement, not a rise in the number of offenders. There is big money to be made in exaggerating the numbers. The NBC show To Catch a Predator, rakes in high ratings as it teams up with a vigilante group called Perverted Justice to lure offenders using online decoys. It makes for sensationalist television: an act of creating the news rather than reporting on it, according to Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

GUEST: Steve Rendall, Senior Analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and co-host of FAIR’s radio show, Counterspin, heard Fridays at 3 pm on KPFK, Janis Wolak, Senior Researcher at Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire

Find out more about the Crimes Against Children Research Center at: http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/.

Read Steve Rendall’s article here: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3752.