Slow Burn

The Persistence of Organized Madness

Here’s a comparison to the news media’s handling of COVID-19, with the most critical facts held back until the end. Watch for them. See what they suggest.

Years ago in Manhattan Beach, California, a local television news reporter offered a live report from the scene of a pre-school where dozens of toddlers “have now each told authorities that he or she had been keeping a grotesque secret of being sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool’s care — and of having been forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals to scare the kids into staying silent.”

The explosive allegations ignited a national panic. Reporters found Satan-worshipping pre-school staff, child prostitution rings, and toddler sex-swaps happening in all over the country. As the media critic for the Los Angeles Times would later note — more about this in a bit — news stories delivered claims as fact: children were tortured, animals were killed, sources say the list of horrors emerging from the McMartin Pre-School grows with each passing day.

The case against the owners and staff of the pre-school eroded slowly. Children told investigators that adults tortured animals to death in front of them, and buried the mutilated carcasses in the yard of the pre-school, but police who dug up the yard didn’t find the mutilated carcasses. The mother who first called the police to report the sexual abuse of her son began to tell more and more bizarre stories: pre-school staff beheaded a baby and made children drink the blood, and sodomized children with their heads forced into toilets. She was soon diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but not before the case she started had gained unstoppable momentum.

Most importantly, the dismal police handling of the allegations became clearer over time. The Manhattan Beach Police Department started their investigation into the paranoid schizophrenic mother’s sexual assault complaint by sending a form letter to every family that had sent children to the pre-school warning them that their children had probably been repeatedly sodomized and tortured.

With that calm opening maneuver, investigators (chief among them a private consultant hired by the DA’s office) began to question children by warning them that they already knew the pre-school staff had done bad things to their private areas, and so they better not lie to the police or they’d get in trouble — but no worries, they added, because they would be rewarded for truthfully saying that the pre-school staff sexually abused them. Authorities questioned 400 children this way, eventually getting most to stop saying that they didn’t know anything about sexual abuse. Threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards, young children told better and better stories about the persistence and intensity of their secret abuse.

Thus armed with devastating testimony from hundreds of children, the DA’s office indicted seven pre-school owners and teachers, charging them with a list of crimes that would grow to over 200 felony counts. Here’s an excerpt from the law professor Doug Linder’s description of the preliminary hearing:

The testimony of children at the preliminary hearing was shockingly bizarre, and often riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions…Children testified that sexual assaults took place on farms, in circus houses, in the homes of strangers, in car washes, in store rooms, and in a "secret room" at McMartin accessible by a tunnel.  One boy told of watching animal sacrifices performed by McMartin teachers wearing robes and masks in a candle-lit ceremony at St. Cross Episcopal Church.  In response to a defense question, the boy added that the kids were forced to drink the blood of the sacrificed animals. Perhaps strangest of all, was the testimony of one boy who said that the McMartin teachers took students to a cemetery where the kids were forced to use pickaxes and shovels to dig up coffins.  Once the coffins were removed from the ground, according to the child, they would be opened and the McMartin teachers would begin hacking the bodies with knives.

Eventually, the McMartin Pre-School case collapsed in on itself, imploding in a series of dismissals and acquittals. The Satanic toddler sex abuse crisis in Manhattan Beach produced precisely zero convictions. Great news for pre-school owner Ray Buckey, by the way, who spent five years in jail as an accused child rapist before being cleared by the criminal justice system.

Now. Back to David Shaw, the media critic at the Los Angeles Times. At the end of all of this madness, Shaw dropped a bomb on the news media with an enormous investigative story about the role of journalists in driving mass hysteria. The Times used to matter in Los Angeles; I remember reading the story in the paper, mouth hanging open, urgently turning pages. And reading it, and reading it. It went on and on and on, through a series of jump pages in a broadsheet newspaper: walls of damning text. Shaw’s big picture verdict, up near the top of the story: “Pack journalism. Laziness. Superficiality. Cozy relationships with prosecutors. A competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be first with the latest shocking allegation, responsible journalism be damned.”

The madness of the investigation drove the madness of the coverage, which drove the madness of the investigation and the prosecution, in a cycle of hysterical reinforcement: “…The media frequently plunged into hysteria, sensationalism and what one editor calls ‘a lynch mob syndrome.’ On so volatile an issue in an election year, defense attorneys maintain, that helped make it all but inevitable that the case would be prosecuted on a scale greater than the actual evidence warranted.”

The mother who made the first allegations, Shaw noted, went on to say that a random Marine had gone AWOL, traveled to the family’s home, and sodomized their dog, while McMartin teachers brought a lion and an elephant to the pre-school and “put staples in the boy’s ears, nipples and tongue and scissors in his eyes.” Sounds good to us, journalists said. Shocking new allegations emerging tonight from McMartin Pre-School!

Shaw, continuing:

National television coverage of McMartin was equally quick to assume the guilt of the defendants. On the “Today” show, Jane Pauley asked a child-abuse expert, “Are you . . . as sickened by this as we are?” and “What is the damage to these children? Are they damaged for life?”

Both “Nightline” and “20/20" broadcast stories that all but convicted the defendants. “Nightline” said, without qualification, that “something was terribly wrong” at McMartin and that “no one knew about the terrible secret that the children here (at McMartin) were afraid to tell” and “this is a story . . . about how even the very young children have to be listened to and believed, like the children at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, Calif.”

Reporters ignored red flags, Shaw concluded, that should have alarmed any rational person. Interviewing reporters and editors who covered the case, the media critic found them embarrassed. They knew what they had done.

So Los Angeles was consumed — and the country was consumed, as reporters “found” other Satanic sex abuse in pre-schools all over the country — with a literally insane set of allegations that began with a phone call to the police from a paranoid schizophrenic. In a herd, unthinking, journalists credulously repeated whatever they were told, no matter how ridiculous it became. And government officials, under intense public pressure to do something because of the absurd coverage of insane allegations, brought a massive list of charges on a completely untenable foundation of idiotic evidence.

But here’s the part I withheld until the end:

The mother in Manhattan Beach called the police about the pre-school in 1983, and the first local TV news report was broadcast in February of 1984.

David Shaw’s damning examination of the news media’s shameful role in a devastating mass hysteria was published in 1990, a few months before prosecutors abandoned the last charges against the last defendant.

I’ll leave my conclusion unspoken, because I’m pretty sure you can see it yourself.