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Last week, a Fox News affiliate out of Milwaukee ran a story about the Nintendo DS and the incredible threat it poses to the well being of anyone, particularly children, who possess one.
The segment starts out innocently enough: a montage of in-game screenshots, giggling kids and some guy saying "Nintendo DS is going to redefine portable handheld gaming the way iPod is redefining music."
However, reporter Brad Hicks interrupts.
"Well, stop the music, because it's also redefining how vulnerable your kids are to child molesters."
Obviously, it's time to get serious. Well, as serious as Fox News can get.
The story continues as Hicks cheerfully explains a feature of the DS called Pictochat, which allows users to talk to each much like the average instant messenger program.
Fox News then points out that most parents don't know about the feature. For a moment, it looks as if there's hope, it looks like this could be a piece on a lack of parent-child interaction and comm-unication.
After the usual paranoid tomfoolery, Hicks decides to demonstrate Fox's theory by chatting with the girls upstairs. He starts off the conversation with pleasantries such as, "What's your dog's name?" But then he moves into pedophile-rapist territory with "What's your name? Where do you go to school? Where do you live?"
Obviously no child is safe, because they are forced to answer these questions by the pedophiles' evil powers. Or maybe they just figured there wasn't anything to worry about, because the person they were messaging was a reporter they recognized from television sitting downstairs with their mother.
In a crowded mall, Hicks demonstrates that the DS's range for interaction with another unit is not the 65 feet as advertised, but 300 feet. Obviously, a pedophile will use his/her telescopic "pedovision" to find a child with Pictochat open (yes, the program has to be running for messages to be sent) in a huge group of shoppers. Right.
The climax of this piece is when Hicks mentions that pedophiles might see kids in the back of a vehicle while on the interstate and, knowing their parents would be too occupied with actually watching the road, would start messaging them.
Wait, what?
The last time I checked, people needed to pay attention to traffic to be able to drive. Then again, pedophiles could just use those evil powers to steer while they tap their DS screens, effortlessly drawing personal information from the children in the next van over.
So what is the lesson here? Getting a DS is one step away from disappearing into the stereotypical white van with no windows that parents everywhere fear. As long as parents don't pay attention to what their children are doing, there will always be the paranoia that kids spend every hour being tracked by molesters. While that paranoia exists, we'll always have Fox News to enhance it to absurd levels.
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