Do you want to know how messed up the news is? Do you want to know why you have to be very careful of the news you receive? I say this to people who only watch FoxNews as well as those who only get their news from CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, LA Times or other news sources. You have to broaden and get your information from many other sources, then you have to question those sources before you can make an informed opinion on a subject.

Last night I heard a story about a mother who had sex with her son and was sentenced. It was a scandalous story filled with everything you could expect from this type of story. The mother gave up the kid for adoption, she found the boy years later and had sex with him. Of course the reporters painted the mother as sick, and let’s be real honest here the woman is sick, however there were important bits of information that have been missing from the story.

Just to sidetrack a little bit but a lot of the information I have gotten about the story have come from the same AP source. That’s where things start to get troubling when following a news story. You might think the LA Times or CBS News might use their own reporters for stories but more often than not stories are gathered from pool organizations like AP. There might be some follow up questions which add up to a sentence or paragraph but the bulk of the story will read the same no matter where you go.

The initial story, which turned out to be incorrect in the AP story, was that the mother gave up the child for adoption at 5 years old and it took her 10 years before she went looking for the child. She gave up the baby soon after it was born and she had been given basic contact information through child services. It seems the 14 or 15 year old was getting into problems and either the boy asked to meet his mother or the social workers felt introducing the biological mother might help him. The son reportedly had become something of a gangbanger wannabe and had been in trouble with the law.

Again, this doesn’t excuse the situation but it paints a different picture of what was going on. The thing is stories like this one are very quick shock trips. When I first heard about it there was a sick feeling to it. There still is but I don’t have the image of a frumpy 35 year old woman with a two pack a day habit and an overweight alcoholic having sex with her 10 year old son. This was the image presented when the story was put out. It was similar to a story recently told in the local paper about a 35 year old teacher, male, who was arrested for sex with a 16 year old. Immediately images of a sleazy man salivating over some young innocent girl filled my head. It turns out that the man, and again I will state I understand it was wrong no matter what the circumstances were, had resisted the advances of the girl for at least six months. Yes, she wanted to have sex with him, he kept refusing and finally he gave in. Once it happened the girl’s parents found out from the girl and charges were pressed.

These are extreme cases but we are manipulated to respond to them in ways which alter the initial perception. The story with the mother seducing her given up for adoption boy gives off the vibe of being a sick and twisted one sided story, but when you put in the element of a 15 year old gangbanger and some other information floating at different news sources, the ‘child’ doesn’t come off as being so innocent. The same goes for the 35 year old teacher. Was he at fault, hell yes he was but when a 16 year old girl forces herself on you there is a bit of questioning that has to be brought up. Just to harp on the teacher thing for a bit, surprisingly it is similar to an episode of 90210 which recently aired. One of the girls, embarrassed for a silly reason, claimed a teacher tried to seduce her. What was the end result? The teacher who did nothing got fired and the student who lied got scorn from the school for an episode. Next week everything was OK with the girl.

I keep wanting to put disclaimers in this article because I think many people will read this quickly and will come to the wrong interpretation that I am in support of the mother or the teacher. That isn’t the case. What I am saying is if we don’t have all the information it is difficult to come to a conclusion that isn’t tainted with false images. With the mother story, if she had sex with a ten year old, there is no way anyone would argue she should be thrown in jail. When you get the whole background, including that the boy was 15 and his background, you still want to throw the book at her, but now you begin to wonder about the boy because he isn’t some naïve 10 year old who might be confused.