Shame on the Today show [1] for trying to scare parents with misleading statistics in a bid for higher viewership. As a former broadcast professional I can't stand this kind of BS.

The last time the Today show got caught doing this, in 2004, they claimed that strangers abducted 58,000 children in the US a year, and didn't source its statistics:

But in such cases, as the media rarely notes, 90 percent of “abductees” return home within 24 hours. The vast majority are teenagers running away with friends or romantic partners and over 99 percent are returned alive and uninjured. (Although many teen girls are involved with sexual activity during the time when they are “missing,” the statistics do not distinguish between voluntary and coerced sex because if the girl is under-age and the male is not, she is not considered capable of consent. The majority of the “missing children” covered by this statistic (65%) are female and 59% are aged 15-17.)

This time, Today was more conservative in its estimate, claiming that only 5,000 children go missing each year. While this is an improvement over 58,000, the implication is still that there are 5,000 stereotypical kidnappings, in which a stranger or acquaintance abducts a child to hold for ransom or abuse and kill him or her. According to the Justice Department, there are only about 115 such incidents each year.

Bottom line: You should always be careful with your children, but you should never live in terror [2]. Especially when the terror is mostly about inflating television news ratings.

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