For over a week television viewers and newspaper readers in New Zealand -and even some overseas- were fed constant updates about Aisling Symes, the two year old girl who went missing from her West Auckland home on October 5th. Any missing person case can be assisted by the media telling viewers/readers to keep their eyes open, but when does the media cross the line from public service, into exploiting tragedy and inciting moral panic? Possibly it was when media like Sky News reported there was “speculation she had been abducted” after all, a possible child abduction is a much bigger news story than an awful accident (later found to be the most probable cause of death). Even earlier than that however the UK based Sunday Times, echoing local media, carried this tidbit of information;

New Zealand police are now treating Aisling’s disappearance as an abduction and have appealed for an Asian woman, who was seen walking her dog near the house at the time the toddler went missing, to come forward. However...the woman has not been identified.

It didn’t take long for statements like that to induce an implicitly racist moral panic; “Asians do love little kids,” wrote one poster on the Real Women forums, “when my daughter was living overseas in an Asian country I did notice that they seemed to have a great fascination with small European children”. Last Friday, an Auckland City Council parks officer followed a woman and her daughter around the Domain concerned that the little girl was Aisling. He told The New Zealand Herald “she was Asian with long dark hair and the girl was European.” Police responded to so many incidents like this they actually warned the public not to persecute “Asian women walking down the road”!

No doubt the most appalling part of the media circus was when television psychic Deb Webber got involved. First, TVNZ -the country’s public broadcaster- invited her to appear on morning news programme Breakfast then later that day at a press conference, TVNZ reporter Amy Kelley told police that Ms Webber had given them information about what had happened to the toddler, and demanded to know what they planned to do about it! TVNZ then approached a friend of Aisling’s family to suggest that they have a meeting the self described “metaphysical researcher”. Could it be that TVNZ staff have a strong faith in the paranormal? More likely they are exploiting a tragedy to promote an up coming tour by the star of Sensing Murder, which airs on the same network.