I was coasting the channels just now and fell upon a woman named Nancy Grace, a blonde woman with a really weird accent, yelling at someone with a sort-of-Dutch accent about the Natalee Holloway case. (I don’t know why I am so fascinated by the accents, but Ms. Grace’s accent is the damndest thing. Where the hell is she from?) A CNN graphic noted that this was **Day 71 ** of the Natalee Holloway disappearance.
We’ve had many threads about how bizarre it is that the Holloway case continues to be played for hours and hours, every day, for so long. (Though for some reason a lot of posters insist on calling her Valerie Holloway.) Some claim it’s because Holloway is a beautiful blonde (I don’t see how she’s beautiful, but okay.) Some have claimed racism. Some have claimed insanity. I don’t care about those things. I don’t see any reason to rehash those issues here. My questions are factual. But they’re media-related so I put them here.
Who, exactly, is watching this stuff? Obviously, someone out amongst the viewership is very interested in Natalee Holloway. If nobody was, they would not be providing so much Holloway coverage. Yet it seems that anyone who is moved to comment on the Holloway coverage does so to bemoan it. **What demographic group is keeping the story alive? **
Is this, in fact, a new Missing Kid Record for non-stop coverage? 71 days now. Every now and then a missing child captivates the public imagination; see Elizabeth Smart. Did her story last 71 days as a lead story, or did it drop off the lead sooner? Has any missing kid ever matched this 71-day run, or is Natalee Holloway now the Cal Ripken Jr. of missing kid newsmakers?
interesting question. Though I think Americans tend to blame the victim in cases of disappearances, this woman probably reminds (White suburbanite) people of their own children or neighbors. One of the “people that this should never happen to.”
NBC ran a story on the news a few days ago that noted that several people of color have gone missing, but the media has been relucant to pick up these stories, even when the facts of the abduction are strikingly similar except race…
It’s not missing-kid, but every so often on a real slow news day the tabloids will still pull out JonBenet Ramsey. Natalee has a long way to go to beat her.
Once the entertainment-oriented “news” media latch onto a story, they have to keep reporting it as if it were big even if events show otherwise, or it would look like they made a grossly irresponsible error in journalistic judgment. The Laci Peterson story is another example - it was revealed to be just another tawdry domestic violence case turned into manslaughter, like hundreds of others every year, but they had no way to let it go. The basic requirement is that the victim be white and female, and look cute in a photo.
I honestly haven’t paid that much attention to the Holloway disappearance, but… isn’t this case a lot like the Schiavo case in a sense – a persistent family of the victim, who somehow keep driving the news cycle?
Well, the producers decide if they should send a reporter to the story not the reporter herself.
That Iranian Hostage Crisis lasted a good long time and it launched Nightline.
Don’t forget that there’s a circular effect - once you give a freak like Nancy Grace a daily prime-time show, she has to basically create sensations like these in order to fill her time slot every day.
So is this a case of the media pushing the easy story, or in fact is there a demand for Holloway news?
See, my confusion is this; I have never met anyone interested in more Holloway news. Nobody on the SDMB seems to want more Holloway coverage. Is this story playing bigger in the red states or something? Maybe because I’m from Canada, I’m not proximate to the grassroots interest in the story.
It’s on again. Some talking head from CourtTV just claimed “When we don’t have Natalie’s story on, people call and complain.” Who are these people?
