Topic Split: Media Coverage of Sensationalistic Events

[serious crayons]

What replaces it is an endless supply of  ...  missing pretty blonde white women

These stories are very sad, and it's very scary that so many pretty blonde white women have disappeared.

However, I take some comfort in the fact that people who are male, non-white, non-blonde, average looking and/or over age 23 apparently never go missing! What are those people doing to protect themselves so successfully? Maybe they could offer some safety tips to the pretty-blonde-white-young-female community.

 

[opinionista]

These stories are very sad, and it's very scary that so many pretty blonde white women have disappeared.

However, I take some comfort in the fact that people who are male, non-white, non-blonde, average looking and/or over age 23 apparently never go missing! What are those people doing to protect themselves so successfully? Maybe they could offer some safety tips to the pretty-blonde-white-young-female community.

 

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

[serious crayons]

I think there have been a couple of cases of girls disappearing who were young, white, pretty -- and dark-haired. But they're rare.

[delalluvia]

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

Natalee's predicatment was all over the news.  I assumed that was because things were slow in Iraq.   

News agencies are not for non-profit.  They have investors and survive on advertising.  What sells is good.  Stories of young, kinda-sorta-pretty, blond white college girls who disappear on little islands considered 'safe' because they're where many people go to vacation is news.

A hispanic girl who disappears close to home who may or may not have tons of ex-boyfriends, bad-tempered husbands, relatives, psycho neighbors or inlaws and/or stalkers in her life is not news.

People are killed mostly by their friends/family/loved ones.

People who are killed by strangers in a faraway exotic places where people go to vacation, let down their hair and have a fun time is news.

People who are killed by cancer or cars is not news.  Thousands if not hundreds of thousands die this way every year.  People who get killed in unusual circumstances - planes, spinach, WTC, etc, even though the number is much smaller - IS news, simply because of the dramatic rarity.

[Phillip Dampier]

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

Holloway gave great cat fights between Rita Sucrets Cosby on MSNBC and Greta who "owned the story" on Fox News.  Night after night, day after day.  Then mom went down and decided to help the Arubans out with their justice system, managing to insult the Dutch territory and its citizens as backwater no-nothings.  After one of the millions of press conference, after one of mom's more vocal tirades, a woman speaking in Dutch outside called Natalee a "slut girl from the states" who came down here, decided to party too much, disappeared, and now this "trailer trash mom from Alabama who can't teach her own children common sense values wants to come down here and tell us poor island folk how to run the place?"

Because the best way to solve a crime is to antagonize the local police force, the Arubans, and get camera elbowing elected American officials into the mix threatening boycotts.

Then Dr. Phil had to add his two cents about how she was kidnapped by a Venezuelan white slavery ring.

Spare us.

[nakymaton]

Can I put in a plug for my favorite news source, National Public Radio (www.npr.org, for people outside the US)? I don't get any television stations, so I get my news by listening to NPR while driving to and from work. And it doesn't hype the disappearance of young white blondes, and the discussion of the spinach scare has included both short pieces explaining what's happened and where, and longer pieces discussing the impact of the bans on farms in California.

I love NPR. It's thought-provoking, it's interesting, it feeds my curiosity about the world without leaving me with this sense of ever-present, ever-changing danger that I get from five minutes of CNN/MSNBC/Fox, or from the network news programs.

Oh, and the morning program has movie reviews from Kenneth Turan, who was my favorite movie critic even before he criticized last year's Oscars.

And before I transform into the electronic equivalent of a fund drive, I'll get out of here.

[serious crayons]

People who are killed by cancer or cars is not news.  Thousands if not hundreds of thousands die this way every year.  People who get killed in unusual circumstances - planes, spinach, WTC, etc, even though the number is much smaller - IS news, simply because of the dramatic rarity.

Right, Del. That is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier regarding spinach.

And I agree that the vacation-sland angle made the Natalee story more newsy. But many of those blonde white girls who've gone missing over the years weren't in Aruba, and some nonwhite girls probably disappear while on vacation. I think there is a tendency for journalists to assume that the disappearances of white girls are shocking and those of nonwhite girls are easily explainable and/or routine.

When I was a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, a city that is two-thirds black, I saw that phenomenon a lot. It's probably not usually deliberate or even conscious, to give the benefit of the doubt, but it happens.

[Giancarlo]

Right, Del. That is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier regarding spinach.

And I agree that the vacation-sland angle made the Natalee story more newsy. But many of those blonde white girls who've gone missing over the years weren't in Aruba, and some nonwhite girls probably disappear while on vacation. I think there is a tendency for journalists to assume that the disappearances of white girls are shocking and those of nonwhite girls are easily explainable and/or routine.

When I was a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, a city that is two-thirds black, I saw that phenomenon a lot. It's probably not usually deliberate or even conscious, to give the benefit of the doubt, but it happens.

I still strongly disagree with you on several factors. I didn't say "don't report this". I'm saying don't make a big media circus out of it because it clearly isn't.

[Phillip Dampier]

Can I put in a plug for my favorite news source, National Public Radio (www.npr.org, for people outside the US)? I don't get any television stations, so I get my news by listening to NPR while driving to and from work. And it doesn't hype the disappearance of young white blondes, and the discussion of the spinach scare has included both short pieces explaining what's happened and where, and longer pieces discussing the impact of the bans on farms in California.

For those unaware, NPR is probably the closest thing we have to an ABC in Australia, BBC in the UK, RTE in Ireland, CBC in Canada, NOS in the Netherlands, NRK in Norway, Deutschlandfunk in Germany, SR in Sweden, etc.  In short, it's not state radio but public radio and television.  It is a private corporation not associated with the government. A great many of their programs are available for podcast, download, live listening, etc.

Unfortunately, the external services of the United States government, such as the Voice of America have been under assault since the Bush Administration came to power and installed Kenneth Tomlinson (who also wormed his way into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for awhile) who is now under investigation for corruption.  Tomlinson is a proponent of using government broadcasting in the "war on terror" which is shorthand for propaganda.  No one is more upset about this than VOA employees themselves who have relied on a firewall between government and broadcasting since VOA's inception in 1942.  VOA and the now many surrogate radio outlets coordinated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (Radio Free Asia, Europe, Liberty + Radio Farda, Radio/TV Marti, etc.) simply don't have the prestige of the BBC any longer.

But perhaps it is time to split this into its own thread....

[serious crayons]

I still strongly disagree with you on several factors. I didn't say "don't report this". I'm saying don't make a big media circus out of it because it clearly isn't.

I'm sorry, Giancarlo, but I don't understand what your point is here. If you're still talking about sensationalizing spinach, fine, whatever. If you're talking about missing girls, then I'm not sure we even disagree.