Ok, how can I say this diplomatically? Although Otto perhaps chose a poor place to raise the point, he did raise a valid point. Namely: Why do we as a society, as reflected by the media coverage, ignore missing-children stories about certain children and provide 24-hour coverage about others?
Even if the Smarts were not media-savvy, their story would have gotten the same kind of wall-to-wall coverage. Meanwhile, a kidnapped black girl from a poor neighborhood of Bridgeport, CT doesn’t even get local coverage anymore.
OK, her recovery was rare, even extrodinary. There is therefore some justification for it being a national story. The main reason that the recovery is a national story, however, is that the abduction was a national story. Seems self-fulfilling.
But the media* makes national stories out of certain events and not others. They have to select what events are going to make the newscast/front section/home page/whatever. Some events are obvious: stumbling towards war, Columbia, etc. Some events are obviously not: various state budget crises, new supermarket opens, etc. On the whole, however, stories that are broadcast nationally are selected; that is, there is a discretionary process at work.
The biggest factor in this discretionary process is public interest. IOW, media outlets select stories that they believe people want to hear about. When they are right, the story persists for days, or even weeks. The Pennsylvania coal miners, for instance. So a story that persists in the headlines, and has national reach, and is at or near the top of the national agenda, therefore reflects on the nation as a whole.
So what does it say about our society that stories about missing blond girls are national and stories about missing black children are not?
It’s a troubling point to raise, and an especially troubling, perhaps inappropriate, one to raise in a thread devoted to the recovery of one of those children.
But think about it. The argument that any missing child story is national because it preys on a parent’s worst nightmares doesn’t work. Because only some children are evidently worth our collective attention span.
The argument that the Smarts themselves are responsible for the interest in their daughter has some weight, because they did do everything they could to feed the media and retain its attention. Nevertheless, this was a national story before they started talking to the press.
Another argument is that the setting provoked national attention: Two girls safe in their bedroom, unknown intruder, kidnapping at gunpoint in the dark of night. Truly terrifying. Could have been written for a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. Yes, it is all that. But is that enough to justify the difference in coverage? Is that more terrifying than having your daughter forced into a van just outside their elementary school?
It seems that we are left with two differentiating qualities between the nationally-covered abductions (not just Elizabeth, but others) and the locally-covered ones: race and class. Race is the point that Otto raised in his second post of the original thread in question. I can’t recall a case of a rich or middle-class minority child kidnapping, so that data point doesn’t exist.
OK, I’ve said my piece and fully expect to be torn to shreds for it. Which is why I posted it to this thread, instead of starting a GD thread on the subject. Even though I didn’t use the word “Asshat” once.
*Definition of “the media”: national broadcast news outlets like CNN, the nightly news on the broadcast networks, Major newspaper chains, and their associated web outlets.
