A Narrower Focus

NPR recently ran a story titled: "HBO's 'Black and Missing' offers an antidote to Missing White Woman Syndrome." The HBO series follows the work of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., as they attempt to bring more media coverage to the many non-White people who go missing in the United States in any given year.

At the end of the piece, one of the documentary's creators, journalist Soledad O'Brien offers eight ways of changing the media dynamic that leads to "Missing White Woman Syndrome." And they're fine for what they are. But it occurs to me that maybe something else (or something different is needed).

Letting local stories be local stories.

The NPR story lists four cases as representative of the problem: Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and JonBenét Ramsey. These were all national stories. Perhaps it's worth asking "why?" There's an implicit assumption in discussions of Missing White Woman Syndrome, which is the assumption that more news coverage is likely to lead to some sort of better outcome, whether that means someone being found before something serious is done to them or a perpetrator being arrested and tried for the crime.

But I suspect that a lot of what feeds into Missing White Woman Syndrome is the understanding that these are stories that can gather attention (and thus, advertising dollars), but don't really use much in the way of local resources. If the Associated Press or ABC are offering up stories that people in the local news market will want to see, why bother reporting on less-interesting local items. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to look at a number of these stories as the exploitation of people's lives for the sake of easier ratings. I, for example, live just outside of Seattle, Washington. There was no reason at all why I needed to know anything about the Gabby Petito case. No law-enforcement agencies in the area needed to be spurred into action by the fact that she hadn't been found. Her story made international headlines because it was salacious, not because it was useful to an international audience. Violence against women and girls may very well be something that concerns everyone, but many of the individual stories that are trotted out as newsworthy would be just as well served if they only spread beyond their local areas in the aggregate.

When more than six hundred thousand people every year are reported missing, expansive nationwide coverage of even a small fraction of them would take up quite a bit of time. If it doesn't add anything of value, why bother? There's a section of the story headed "Forcing the world to see those long ignored," but there really isn't any way to force that. And if "the world" isn't the right audience, what does forcing them to see random people actually do?