Letters: Amber Alert annoyance
Re “Right call on Amber Alert,” Editorial, Aug. 13
Last week’s cellphone Amber Alert to millions of people in the West was more than a “minor inconvenience.”
How many pilots, surgeons, first responders and nurses sleeping between 12-hour shifts (who keep their phones on for rare family emergencies) were awakened by this grating sound?
The Times claims that the “novel use of cellphone messaging … kept the missing girl and her alleged kidnapper, James Lee DiMaggio, constantly in the news.” But we know that such stories dominate the media with or without phone alerts.
Instead of promulgating this new system, perhaps The Times could publish a front-page box each day in which you broadcast news that really isn’t news: “More than 20,000 small children worldwide died yesterday, many from preventable causes.”
Jean Collinsworth
Claremont
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