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Latoyia Figueroa is still missing after 8 days. And as tragic as the Natalee Holloway case might be, Natalee doesn’t have a seven year old child wondering where she is, nor was Natalee (to the best of our knowledge) 5 months pregnant.
When will the media cover it?
Oliver Willis
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/07/27/Philadelphia.missing/index.html
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight now.
I think when CNN, MSNBC, and Fox run half-hour programs about her and then interrupt political news to tell us about her, then it will seem fair.
If Ms Figueroa was white and named “Misty Williams,” the media would be all over this like… um… white on rice.
A MSNBC Commercial:
Tucker Carlson: “Tonight on The Situation .. a 25 year old missing mother in Philly …. “
I’m sure that, a few years from now, a Lexis search for “Natalee Holloway” will turn up far more results than a search for “Misty Williams”.
I think the same thing can be said of Elizabeth Smart: a pretty blonde from a white upper-middle class family will receive more attention than any other ethnicity.
An interesting experiment would be to compare media coverage of this variety among disappearances of multiple ethnicities of the same age and from the same social stratum. Would a 15 year old black daughter of a doctor receive less media coverage than the white daughter of a lawyer? After all, OJ got off.
http://x1.putfile.com/7/20720571217.jpg
Yeah no one is surely covering her!
http://x1.putfile.com/7/20721500690.jpg
Wow a nice long segment on Greta … but no one is paying attention to her!
ian, only after bloggers made a stink about it. It surely hasnt received Natalie Holloway/Lacie Peterson coverage.
Oliver as much as blogging is “the thing”, I doubt that blogging has made a difference in MSM coverage. Places like FOX News (the most powerful name in news) think blogging is a joke. In fact none of the cable news channels take it seriously, they just do it because again it’s the new thing. MSNBC’s Connected puts up foolish blogs that no one has ever heard of in their blog reax. On CNN they mentioned “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo” on TV, I mean come on “Skippy” …
Natalee made it on TV, not because she is WHITE (which we know is your opinion), but because she went missing in a nearby foreign country that the US sends a lot of tourism to. Also Natalee’s mom is a hound and got a hold of the media ASAP.
Peterson didn’t make as much news as Natalee did, and the story of her missing didn’t get as much coverage as Scott’s trial. The only reason she was popular was she went missing in a “perfect” town.
Latoyia is getting more popular every second, there was just a FOX News Alert that spent ten minutes on her. They have search teams going on:
http://x1.putfile.com/7/20810454159.jpg
That is the search team.
She is getting news .. she has only been missing for 10 days .. Natalee didn’t get popular until a good week into the coverage.
Calm down with your “because she is black no one cares”. I haven’t heard anything from Philly’s mayor, John Street, who is BLACK.
I have not heard anything from Latoyia’s congresswoman - Chaka Fattah (who is BLACK).
So please, lets stop blaming the white people.
Also can we please stop moderating my comments.
This is almost comical. “Will they cover it?”
Why yes! In fact, it’s on the front page of fox right now, much more visable than holloway.
But instead of admitting, well, they did, it’s sour grapes. They didn’t cover it enough! They didn’t cover it until we complained! Please. As far as it being covered on foxnews tv, if it gets ratings, they’ll cover it, if not, they won’t.
Keep playing the victim.
The coverage of Holloway, Laci Peterson, etc was saturation form the moments someone realized a crime has comitted. It is a fact that missing blacks and hispanics don’t get the coverage that a missing white woman does (neither, for that matter, do missing white males). None of these stories should be huge national stories, but if they are going to be, I dont think its beyond the pale to demand that minorities get similar coverage.
It’s not just that Natalee and Peterson were white, but they were both attractive.
That’s the key. No one cares if an ugly hag is missing.
Oliver- I’m with you on this. The Missing PWG Syndrome is rampant, and I think Fox is on to something in getting in the lead on this LaToyia case. O’Reilly of all people was saying this a few years ago when a little black girl came up missing in Florida and it seemed that he was the only one who was making a stink about it.
And making them huge national stories is becoming ridiculous. I guess the one value I see in it is that people are sometime found because of all the attention. Like that “Shasta” girll found in the cafe in Idaho.
It really doesn’t have to do with white people .. btw, please excuse me if I am wrong .. but a few years ago up until a few months ago wasn’t there a huge stink over a black male who went missing from work and they found his body recently … it was in Washington DC I think ..
But maybe it is pretty people. The missing black girl now is pretty, Natalee is pretty .. so maybe that is right. /sarcasm
And BTW Oliver, you’re wrong about news outlets reporting it the moment a crime was involved:
http://news.google.com/news?as_q=Natalee+Holloway&svnum=10&as_scoring=r&hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nsrc=&as_nloc=&as_occt=any&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=6&as_maxd=10&as_maxm=6
Not that that matters anyways because we are talking about missing people, not when a crime is comitted. Al though a crime is comitted 99% of the time when some one goes missing …
The girl in Philly is getting a lot of coverage .. FOX’s day shows spent a good portion on it.
You yourself said it oliver. A missing white man wouldn’t get the coverage of holloway.
This isn’t about race. I know that’s a favorite democratic tactic, though you normally avoid it. Make holloway a man, or ugly, and the coverage slacks.
Local news used to run some national stories.
Now the national news runs mostly local stories.
And increasingly, local news is a re-hash of all the local stories shown on the national news, as news departments become too lazy to actually find out what’s happening around them in their own city.
So now we have a careful selection of stories designed to catch the attention of the most people. It’s lazy reporting more than racism. If it happened a few years ago most of us would never had heard of Scott Peterson, since the national news would’ve left it as a local story, as it should have been.
But you’re right to shame the national outlets into covering this (as USAToday actually said in their article), since it would be interesting to learn what stories get elevated as ‘important’ to share with the world, and which don’t. I do suspect it’s a subtle form of racism, no different than the recurrent profiles of the injured/killed white kids in the tsunami.