100 Objects #9: Missing Children Milk Carton

99% Invisible turns to one of the most haunting images of the nineteen-eighties: the face of a missing child printed on the side of a milk carton. The episode traces how the nineteen eighty-two disappearance of Johnny Gosch, a twelve-year-old Iowa paperboy, helped turn a regional dairy campaign into a national symbol distributed by the billions. As Roman Mars and Annie Brown tell it, the campaign also fueled a wave of stranger-danger fear that shaped American misconceptions about child safety still echoing today.

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