Gatt writes:

What's troubling is that I think it's a political/radio-show/media driven;
sort an analog to the left-wing superfreakout about school shootings and
church sex scandals, or the general public's paranoia about airplanes.

That's because the real objective of the news media is to frighten people.
Frightened people will continue to watch and read the news in a vain search
for reassurance. Unfrightened people tend not to watch and read the news very
much. So to sustain viewer/reader numbers, the media sensationalizes the news
and emphasizes the bad, scary side of everything, in order to keep everyone
scared.

Unfortunately, this tends to make viewers/readers excessively paranoid over
time, as they come to believe that the world is orders of magnitude more
dangerous than it actually is. This causes them to behave hysterically, and
it also encourages them to sacrifice their freedoms in exchange for assurances
of security even though the security is both illusory and unnecessary.

Stastics show that aviation is safer than ever, that school shootings
haven't increased since the '60s, and, probably, that there's no more
misconduct now in church than ever; the media cycle is just quicker and
avenues of dialog are free and abundant, so we all hear about them more.

Yes. A lot of people sit mesmerized in front of CNN or Fox all day, but few
people ever actually look things up.

But I keep flipping on the morning traffic report and hearing some talk show
idiot talking about "Pubic screwls" and the next thing you know, somebody's
ranting on the usenet. I Do Not Know Anybody who ever claimed to be
molested by a teacher or a preacher, ever, but they make it sound like it
happens everywhere and that it's tolerated.

It is in fact very rare, and many of the cases that do exist exist only
because the definition of molestation is so broad in so many areas (e.g.,
kissing a student on the cheeck may count as molestation, even when one
six-year-old kisses another).