Whenever a missing person becomes a continuing news story, she is almost certain to be an attractive white girl or young woman:
Molly Bish. Carly Brucia. Rachel Cooke. Audrey Herron. Polly Klaas. Chandra Levy.
Kristen Modafferi. Kimberley Pandelios. Laci Peterson. JonBenet Ramsey. Audrey Seiler.
Dru Sjodin. Elizabeth Smart. Linda Sobek. Danielle van Dam. Brooke Wilberger.
More than 800,000 missing persons cases are on file with the FBI. Most of those are children, many of whom show up within hours of having wandered off.
But “when was the last time you heard something about a 23-year-old black female who was missing on NBC or ‘World News Tonight’?” asked David Hazinski, a former NBC News correspondent who teaches broadcast journalism at the University of Georgia.
“It’s all about sex,” said Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. Young white women give editors and television producers what they want.
“There are several common threads,” Clark said. “The victims that get the most coverage are female rather than male. They are white, in general, rather than young people of color. They are at least middle class, if not upper middle class.”
Such cases fit a convenient narrative pattern that storytellers have used for more than a century, a pattern whose design still incorporates remnants of an outmoded view of women and black people and their roles in society.
“In many, many cities going back 50, 75 years or more, journalists would refer to ‘good murders’ and ‘bad murders,’” Clark said, explaining how editors and reporters choose what police stories to cover.
“The example of a bad murder would be the murder of an African-American person from a poor neighborhood,” he said. “The definition of a good murder is a socialite killed by her jealous husband, the debutante murdered by her angry boyfriend.”
When it comes to police stories, Clark said, there is “this perverted, racist view of the world. White is good; black is bad. Blonde is good; dark is bad. Young is good; old is bad. And I think we can find versions of this story going back to the tabloid wars of more than a hundred years ago.”
