At least for two of those cases it’s fairly obvious why they didn’t get national media attention:
David Robinson - Authorities do not suspect foul play (big check mark against national media interest.) He was said to be acting “strangely” in the days before his disappearance (feeds a narrative he’s done something to disappear, be it suicide or what have you, big check mark against national media interest.) The only real “hook” in this story is his Jeep–details around its recovery are a little weird, but weird enough to generate high levels of attention? The Jeep had been crashed, but there was sign that it was recovered at a different location from the crash site, and had been started at least 40 times since the crash.
Jelani Day - This case has even less of a hook than the above. No signs of foul play. The car was found abandoned 60 miles away. There is basically little to no evidence at all. This isn’t a “good” story, but it’s actually not totally unusual for missing persons cases–of which again, some 600,000 or more get opened every year. There are many, many stories of people who “choose to disappear” for years at a time, and sometimes their stories start just like this. There’s also plenty of stories where people go off somewhere privately to end their lives, and those stories start off like this as well, often not cleared up for years later when happenstance results in their remains being found.
I see this more as reflection of what society wants rather than what the media is controlling. The media is going to cover whatever brings in the ratings. If people tuned in for coverage of disappearances of ugly people, old people, men, non-white people, etc., then that’s what the media would cover. A young, pretty, white woman is a ratings bonanza for the news organizations. They give the people what they want. If people want more even coverage of missing people, they need to tune in when those disappearances are covered.
One issue with a lot of missing Native Americans is they are often women who have been involved in “serious life problems”, for lack of a more encompassing term. Lower income women who have fallen into drug addiction, sometimes prostitution etc. That does not mean those people don’t matter, but the brutal reality is the perception of viewers is “drug addicts and prostitutes die and disappear” and that it isn’t “interesting” that they do so. Cable news networks that fuel the “Missing White Woman” stories need 24 hour content, often sensational content, to keep up ratings. Cable news viewers are also overwhelming older, whiter, and wealthier than the average, they aren’t interested in these stories.
So are most missing white women. But not all of them, nor all missing people in other demographics (older, less attractive, poorer, non-white).
This is a case where news coverage is clearly not representative. Some would rather that not be due to systemic bias but the evidence that it isn’t is rather weak.
I think it’s more the term “systemic” for something that is largely confined to 24 hour cable news generated coverage and has only involved like 15 cases in the last 30 years is probably being exaggerated as a large scale systemic issue.
Literally every case of a “non white women” that has just been posted as being “not given attention” actually had local news coverage. So the issue isn’t that these cases aren’t covered, it’s that none of these cases become a “media frenzy”, which I’m not actually sure media frenzies are appropriate or even desirable for cases like this for a number of reasons. I think it’s kind of misrepresenting the scale and scope of what’s actually going on. A few large media companies determine if something becomes a “media frenzy” or not, and they mostly have older, whiter, middle class or wealthier audiences. They’re going to serve that audience, not people that don’t consume their content.
And your point about many cases of missing white women involves women who are addicted to drugs, involved in prostitution, not young, not attractive etc kind of proves my point–none of those stories becomes a national media frenzy either. To demonstrate your point you’d need to find a case of a young, attractive, middle class minority woman who disappears under mysterious circumstances, with a ready made “bad suspect” available to hate, where that person didn’t get the “media frenzy” treatment. You’d then need to look at how many such cases occur involving a minority vs a white person, and what % of each become media frenzies.
As I said initially, there’s an incredible amount of systemic claims being made about a very small selection of media events.
This thread isn’t about generic media coverage but about media frenzies themselves, i.e. why did the Gabby Petito case in particular blow up nationally? Sure, my local news is going to cover local missing persons cases but that’s not going to go viral.
So how many cases that ‘should be a media frenzy’ like Gabby Petito, have happened to minority women, and how many of them did not become media frenzies?
All I’m saying is this isn’t like high level data we’re looking at. There’s lots of high level data showing systemic racism in American society, but you/we are not working with actual data here, we’re working with a very limited phenomenon with such ill defined bounds and lack of data that it’s sloppy to just make the assumptions being made.
Nah, not in this case. They were social media hounds. Lots of people followed them. I know it’s a thing, and I don’t like it but under these circumstances I don’t it was the driving issue.
When you’re hitting the extreme tail end of the bell curve, systemic bias has an outsized effect. If you have 50,000 missing white girls and 50,000 missing black girls, and only 10 are going to get massive nationwide coverage because they are “uniquely interesting”, a small variation in the perceived interestingness of the different races (or even just the perceived interest of the audience) can shift the coverage to 10 white girls vs. 0 black girls in the news.
Yeah this is also a weird thing. Name the last non -black person who was murdered by the police and it made the news for any length of time. Hispanics are 2nd in terms of victims of police brutality and yet I can’t think of the names of any, but I can name 10 black people murdered by the cops.
Literally the woman who got shot at the Capitol Building is the only one I can think of and that’s also because it was in such a bizarre circumstances.
Don’t know if I could call it the “last”, but I remember it well. Mesa PD is an equal-opportunity killing force. Back in the 90s they pumped like a hundred bullets into an SUV with two white teenagers.
I know I’m late to this discussion, but this honestly feels kinda like a spin on the Streisand effect in action. I’ve seen 5x more coverage calling this out for being MWWS than I have seen actual coverage of the event. Maybe it’s because here in Chicago we see multiple stories each night about a minority getting killed somewhere locally. The outrage energy seems to completely outstrip the actual missing person energy. Take it for what it’s worth.
The OP’s question is rhetorical, right? The answer is blowing in the wind.
Yes, here in Chicago there are lots news of reports of women and girls who go missing. And they are generally reported once. And not nationally. And certainly not nationally for weeks or days.
Blowing in the wind, my friends.
(RIP Gabby Petito. None of it is your fault)
I think it’s also worth considering that at least sometimes the nationalization of these “sensationalized” cases may do more harm than good. In most missing persons cases the best information comes from locals and people who know the person, a national sensation tends to attract a deluge of false reports that swamp investigators.
There is certainly lots of Missing White Girl syndrome. But I think the extra hook is the boyfriend’s bizarre behavior. The first headline I remember was about how he had lawyered up and wouldn’t talk to police. Having an obvious suspect and a steadily unfolding story (looong trail of breadcrumbs) gives it legs.
Most missing person cases are like “… she left the party and was never seen again.” There’s just nothing more to report.
Justine Damond, killed by an officer in Minneapolis when she approached the vehicle after placing a 911 call about a prowler. I remember mostly because pretty much the only time police are charged after shooting an unarmed person is when the victim is white, unless there’s a shitstorm of media coverage.
Even then it’s iffy. Noor, the officer in question, just had his murder conviction overturned. He’s expected to be re-tried for manslaughter and released with time served later this year.
Quite sickeningly, the latest QAnon conspiracy is that the whole Gabby Petito case is a “false flag” to distract people from Biden’s many failures:
Perhaps the most detached-from-reality comment within that article is how it must be fake, because you never see this kind of media attention devoted to a missing white girl!
And these missing white women stories become Dateline and 20/20 episodes and OWN or Lifetime docudramas. Why? Because these programs are watched by white consumers.
You’re pretty close to the correct answer. It’s because news/content editors for national news programs attempt to put out what people will watch. The news is a business. They need ratings for advertisers just like dramas, sit-coms, etc.
Is it racist that news editors, etc. know that 72% of the US population is white, and that they put out content that will be more appealing to white viewers?