Post by happyhaddock on Sept 28, 2007 11:46:11 GMT -5
Political Connection: Subconscious racism apparent in coverage of missing persons << LINK
Tulsi Roy, Columnist
Have you heard of Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, or Natalee Holloway?
If you rely on the American media for your source of information, you probably have. The mainstream media was on these missing persons cases from the get-go, plastering their pretty smiling faces on every news channel. Hours upon hours of airtime have been devoted to these missing individuals. Newspapers, radio stations, and especially television networks have covered the exhaustive FBI and volunteer searches, the candlelight vigils, and every new development in each case until everyone in America knew their names. In the case of Natalee Holloway, it didn't stop there. The 18-year-old Alabaman didn't just garner mere national attention. The Dutch Marines and the Aruban government pitched in with the "rescue" effort when she disappeared during her Caribbean class trip.
What about Angela Frances Lynne Delucca, Diamond and Tionda Bradley, or Christian Ferguson? Have you heard of them?
Probably not. These children are only a few of the 58,000 American children gone missing each year. And unlike Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway, they are among the number of missing minorities that are far less likely to garner attention from large media networks like ABC, CNN, FOX, or MSNBC. It seems like the media has chosen to focus almost exclusively on missing white photogenic women. Why is it that we constantly hear about each new development in their cases, while for the majority of missing children, the only mention they receive is a poster in the entrance of the local Wal-Mart?
Far be it from me to play the race card here: I admit, certainly the stories of Smart, Holloway, and Peterson are tragic in their own right, but what makes them more newsworthy than the stories of so many other underrepresented people? While JonBenet Ramsey and Elizabeth Smart became, quite literally, the poster children of a parent's worst fears, no African-American, Hispanic, or Asian child in a corresponding situation has ever been such a household name, much less made national television at all. The issue might be more complex than just simple racism, but the fact that media icons of the missing tend to be attractive white women is just one manifestation of seemingly blatant race, gender, and socioeconomic discrimination in order to create a specific archetype of who is to be considered a "damsel in distress." Hysteria within 24-hour cable news networks over their damsels in distress has reached such levels that some have christened the hype "Missing White Woman Syndrome" or MWWS for short.
Don't believe me?
A few months before Laci Peterson vanished, a nine-months pregnant Evelyn Hernandez, 24, and her son, Alex, were reported missing. Later, Evelyn's decapitated body washed up in the same bay as Laci's corpse. Why didn't the national media jump on this case? It certainly had every element of a "good" news story that the Peterson disappearance possessed – the missing woman brutally slain in cold blood, the gruesome discovery of the body, and the suspicious boyfriend. By the media's (non)reaction, it can only be concluded that maybe nobody really cares if one Hispanic woman mysteriously disappears. Right?
On July 18, 2005, another young woman went missing. LaToyia Figueroa, 24, was the same kind of smiling, pretty young woman whose disappearance has become daily media fodder in recent years. Except for one thing: LaToyia, five months pregnant and the mother of a seven-year-old, came from a lower-income black family, while the missing women regularly portrayed on television are overwhelmingly white and financially well-off. Figueroa's frustrated family had resorted to picketing on a busy street corner in an effort to draw attention to her disappearance.
But perhaps I'm only revealing one side of the argument? The VP of programming at MSNBC, Mark Effron, points out that he "didn't even know [Natalee Holloway] was white" when news of her case went public. We can be assured he was plenty surprised by his discovery that (yes!) Holloway turned out to be a pretty blonde female. Bill Shine, VP of programming at FOX News, says that "the stories that 'go national' all have a twist or an emotional aspect to them that make them interesting." Because we all know that the other 57,999 children going missing each year have nothing interesting about their cases. And we're always hearing how unemotional the families of missing children are.
Perhaps news journalists believe that running around-the-clock coverage of a few missing white women will raise their ratings. As more criticism on the coverage gap emerges, the public outcry grows stronger for newsrooms that do not believe the public is interested in every lurid tale about a white woman and not about the horrifying things happening across the country to people who are less photogenic and not Caucasian.
Tulsi Roy is a sophomore biology, history, and philosophy of science major.
Tulsi Roy, Columnist
Have you heard of Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, or Natalee Holloway?
If you rely on the American media for your source of information, you probably have. The mainstream media was on these missing persons cases from the get-go, plastering their pretty smiling faces on every news channel. Hours upon hours of airtime have been devoted to these missing individuals. Newspapers, radio stations, and especially television networks have covered the exhaustive FBI and volunteer searches, the candlelight vigils, and every new development in each case until everyone in America knew their names. In the case of Natalee Holloway, it didn't stop there. The 18-year-old Alabaman didn't just garner mere national attention. The Dutch Marines and the Aruban government pitched in with the "rescue" effort when she disappeared during her Caribbean class trip.
What about Angela Frances Lynne Delucca, Diamond and Tionda Bradley, or Christian Ferguson? Have you heard of them?
Probably not. These children are only a few of the 58,000 American children gone missing each year. And unlike Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway, they are among the number of missing minorities that are far less likely to garner attention from large media networks like ABC, CNN, FOX, or MSNBC. It seems like the media has chosen to focus almost exclusively on missing white photogenic women. Why is it that we constantly hear about each new development in their cases, while for the majority of missing children, the only mention they receive is a poster in the entrance of the local Wal-Mart?
Far be it from me to play the race card here: I admit, certainly the stories of Smart, Holloway, and Peterson are tragic in their own right, but what makes them more newsworthy than the stories of so many other underrepresented people? While JonBenet Ramsey and Elizabeth Smart became, quite literally, the poster children of a parent's worst fears, no African-American, Hispanic, or Asian child in a corresponding situation has ever been such a household name, much less made national television at all. The issue might be more complex than just simple racism, but the fact that media icons of the missing tend to be attractive white women is just one manifestation of seemingly blatant race, gender, and socioeconomic discrimination in order to create a specific archetype of who is to be considered a "damsel in distress." Hysteria within 24-hour cable news networks over their damsels in distress has reached such levels that some have christened the hype "Missing White Woman Syndrome" or MWWS for short.
Don't believe me?
A few months before Laci Peterson vanished, a nine-months pregnant Evelyn Hernandez, 24, and her son, Alex, were reported missing. Later, Evelyn's decapitated body washed up in the same bay as Laci's corpse. Why didn't the national media jump on this case? It certainly had every element of a "good" news story that the Peterson disappearance possessed – the missing woman brutally slain in cold blood, the gruesome discovery of the body, and the suspicious boyfriend. By the media's (non)reaction, it can only be concluded that maybe nobody really cares if one Hispanic woman mysteriously disappears. Right?
On July 18, 2005, another young woman went missing. LaToyia Figueroa, 24, was the same kind of smiling, pretty young woman whose disappearance has become daily media fodder in recent years. Except for one thing: LaToyia, five months pregnant and the mother of a seven-year-old, came from a lower-income black family, while the missing women regularly portrayed on television are overwhelmingly white and financially well-off. Figueroa's frustrated family had resorted to picketing on a busy street corner in an effort to draw attention to her disappearance.
But perhaps I'm only revealing one side of the argument? The VP of programming at MSNBC, Mark Effron, points out that he "didn't even know [Natalee Holloway] was white" when news of her case went public. We can be assured he was plenty surprised by his discovery that (yes!) Holloway turned out to be a pretty blonde female. Bill Shine, VP of programming at FOX News, says that "the stories that 'go national' all have a twist or an emotional aspect to them that make them interesting." Because we all know that the other 57,999 children going missing each year have nothing interesting about their cases. And we're always hearing how unemotional the families of missing children are.
Perhaps news journalists believe that running around-the-clock coverage of a few missing white women will raise their ratings. As more criticism on the coverage gap emerges, the public outcry grows stronger for newsrooms that do not believe the public is interested in every lurid tale about a white woman and not about the horrifying things happening across the country to people who are less photogenic and not Caucasian.
Tulsi Roy is a sophomore biology, history, and philosophy of science major.
