Aug 17 2007
If You Turn Up MIA Pray You’re the “Right” Race
Welcome to Scuttlebutt Pipeline! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up to receive email notifications of new entries.
Also, don't forget to check out Fifty for the Fall, your chance to win $50 cash - no strings attached!
If you or a loved one turns up missing it doesn’t matter what your age, race, sex, and social status is. This is the United States and everyone is equal darn it! But according to this article statistics show that race, sex, and age does play a huge factor in the reporting of missing people:
If you are kidnapped or missing, it helps to be the right race, age, social class and gender. Otherwise, don’t expect the media to cover your story.
“Sex sells, kidnapping sells, but not every kidnapping is equal,” says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Kelly Bennett, a case manager for the National Center for Missing Adults, agrees. “Unless it’s a pretty girl ages 20 to 35, the media exposure is just not there,” she says. The most highly profiled missing persons cases in recent years have fit into this category: Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Jessie Marie Davis. All of these women were also white.
Doesn’t this just make you sick? I know my stomach became rather queasy at the thought that such disparity occurs, but when I think about it I have to wonder how I never noticed this before. Years ago there was quite a sensational case here in New Mexico, Carly Martinez a very pretty young woman attending NMSU disappeared. She received tons of coverage her in our state and in parts of Texas but when it came to reporting on the national level - nada, nothing, zip, zero.
She was a pretty young woman but she was Hispanic.
This is very sad and disgusting. When you stop look closely, it makes you think of all the issues that are affected by the same type of discrimination. Our media chooses what they want to cover.