My wife and I watched the news a few days ago (we’re in Canada) and heard a story about a black woman, forget which state, whose body had been found something like a month after she went missing. It caught our attention because her disappearance had never been mentioned in the media. That and the fact that Bill Maher had made exactly the same comment on Larry King a few nights previously: “It’s always middle, or upper-middle class white women who are missing. No one cares if (insert a number of black female names here) goes missing.”
Bolding mine. I assume you are referring to LaToyia Figueroa. It is not true that this case was never mentioned in the media. The case didn’t get as much publicity as Natalee Holloway or Laci Petersen, for example, but it got quite a bit, especially after some bloggers started a publicity campaign. If you’d taken the time to Google for some information (1,330,000 results for “missing woman pregnant” with the top story being LaToyia Figueroa, 81,900 results for “LaToyia Figueroa”), perhaps you wouldn’t have found it necessary to make a snarky remark about “America”.
The news shows stories about (X), because they feel like it.
People watch stories about (X), because they’re on the news.
The news hires contractors to discover what people are watching, because they want to know what people like.
The contractors discover that people watched the news stories about (X), because they were on the news.
The news decides that (X) must be a very popular topic, because people watched the news stories about them.
The news shows more stories about (X), because they think people like them.
Goto 3, because people watch the news, so it must be working.
This cycle perpetuates until people are so sick and tired of (X) that they stop watching the news entirely, at which point they pick something new to blather about. Goto 1, but substitute topic (Y), because people will watch stories about that for an entire fucking month too.
I, meanwhile, continue to not watch the news, because 1-9 piss me right the hell off.
I don’t blame Mrs. Holloway one bit, though. The woman lost her daughter; the agony of that is just unimaginable to me. My daughter is still seven weeks from being born and the idea of her being hurt already makes me sick to my stomach. If the media is willing to obsess over Natalee Holloway, then her mother would be a fool NOT to use it to her advantage. Some goes for Cindy Sheehan. If someone killed my child, I’d consider their actions remarkably moderate. I’d be out with a shotgun looking for someone to punish.
This is happening because someone loves watching Holloway coverage. Who is it?
When John Kennedy Jr.'s plane went down, there was lots of on-the-scene coverage from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. During the endless live coverage, one reporter mentioned how much media attention[sup]*[/sup] the story was generating and had her cameraman pan around to show a long row of news trucks all set up so they could shoot their footage with the same family house in the background. I was hoping that one of the other cameramen would be panning around to show her and the wholly bloody lot of them would get sucked in as a navel-gazing feedback loop formed and then gloriously imploded.
Multiple sources covering the same news is not a problem. But when they start covering the coverage, it’s time to pack it in.
I am disappointed, but no longer surprised by people on TV and radio who can talk about “the media” as if it didn’t include them.
It did not receive anywhere near the amount of publicity or the non-stop variety of publicity of either the Peterson or Holloway cases. I’m not surprised that it didn’t filter into Canadian news.
Also, quite honestly, the news that I did see on Ms. Figueroa struck me as being inspired by the criticism of the “where all the white women at?” focus of the news. A sort of token black woman.