The 9/11 babies were born into the role of ratings tool, a role they will continue to play for quite some time.

Too young to say “no,” salivating media drones slapped a label on them that will endure throughout their entire lives. Instead of doing the right thing and waiting until they were old enough to decide whether or not they wanted constant, undeserved scrutiny, the news media snatched them up and propelled them into a stardom that few attain. According to ABC News, people should care because during the Sept. 11 attacks, these children lost their dads.

So did children born before Sept. 11. What’s your point?

Furthermore, they go on to say they want to know what happened to Daddy.

So do children born before Sept.11. After Sept. 11. Children born every day. What’s your point?

One loss is more meaningful due to circumstance. That is their point.

For both sets of children, fathers are dead. The essential difference lies in the manner of death and the coverage given to both, but is it a standard by which we should judge importance? Men with families die everyday, but those children are not paraded across the news for ratings. They are not puppets used to evoke sympathy. To honor this select group is insulting, extremely disrespectful to those who died in less infamous ways; it sends those survivors the message that their loss is somehow less meaningful.

To the widow forced into two jobs after the loss of her husband on a nightly commute from work, her loss impacts her life and the lives of her children far more than anything that occurred on Sept. 11. They couldn’t care less about the 9/11 babies. I don’t.

And neither does ABC News.

Born to people who were involved in an event in which America “lost its innocence” — how a country that supported slavery, robbed the native peoples of their land, launches wars under false pretenses, and has a nasty habit of suspending the Bill of Rights whenever it pleases while purporting to be the defender of liberty can “lose its innocence” is an odd notion — and were thrust into the spotlight, the media utilized them to gain ratings and evoke sympathy with people they have never met.

In turn, other stories, stories that might have relevance, stories that might be truly important to people, are either ignored or pushed so far out to sea that they might as well give up and drown.

The media’s guidelines for covering a story run like this: Will people watch? If yes, cover it. Beat it to death, reanimate it and beat it some more. If not, ignore it, or cover it lightly, perhaps it will catch, but if not, ignore it. Completely ignore it.

Natalee Holloway vanishes in Aruba. We must care. Meanwhile, millions of others vanish, but thanks to their lack of marketing value, coverage for them is limited to local areas, if at all.

Same with the deaths of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Savagely tortured and brutalized, very few media outlets ran with this story. Why wasn’t this newsworthy? Here’s why: The media had nothing to gain from their deaths. I guarantee that if they thought they could have made money off it, they would have run with it. Primetime, top of the hour.

In the end, two slain college students in Knoxville doesn’t create quite the air of fear other stories do. Stories that frighten people. Stories that make them tune in. Stories that take their mind off other matters, such as the Iraq debacle. People are frightened. Frightened of sending their children to Aruba, frightened of imaginary monsters and enemies lurking everywhere that are promoted and forced upon us for the public to fear so that they will direct their attention away from real issues and towards a series of constantly arising problems, no end, no permanent solution in sight.

No hope either.

The U.S. government is not the world police, the defender of freedom and all that other nonsense. It is an organization whose purpose is to promote its own interests here and abroad at the expense of all others. This is what happened in Iraq and will continue to happen.

It’d pay dividends to never forget this. … But another girl disappeared and another disease is threatening us all. How captivating. I won’t budge until I figure out what to do.

What they tell me to do.

I’m an American. I know where my priorities lie.

— Travis Lee is a senior in French. He can be reached at [email protected].