White, Pretty, Rich: Media Biased On Missing Persons (Gays and Minorities hardest hit

[CaptainHook]

White, Pretty, Rich: Media Biased On Missing Persons (Gays and Minorities hardest hit)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1425561/posts

Tampa Tribune ^ | Jun 18, 2005 | MIC E BEARDEN

Posted on 06/18/2005 5:13:52 AM PDT by Sam's Army

White, Pretty, Rich: Media Biased On Missing Persons

By MIC E BEARDEN [email protected] Published: Jun 18, 2005

Bonnie Lee Dages and her 4- month-old son, Jeremy, never made national news.

Their disappearance on April 28, 1993, barely made local news. The 18-year-old single mother and her son are just two more sad statistics, but not for their still-grieving family and friends.

``It's as if nobody cares. Not just about my daughter but other daughters out there who are gone,'' says Larry Dages, the Lithia father who can never forget. ``Maybe people just get tired of hearing about it.''

Yet, other missing girls and women have become fixtures in our national memory: Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Lori Hacking, Chandra Levy, Dru Sjodin and now Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teen who vanished in Aruba while on a senior class trip.

All white, attractive females from middle- and upper-class families, their stories were told and retold beyond regional markets and became fodder for national media, from newspapers to 24-hour cable TV news.

``The lesson is this: If you're a missing older Asian lesbian, your story probably won't see the light of day,'' says Cynthia Lont, professor of communication at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. ``And if the parents aren't educated and don't give good sound bites, you are really out of luck.''

Of the nearly 47,600 missing-adult cases being tracked by the FBI in May, 53 percent were men and 29 percent were black.

The media obsession with beautiful women effectively masks that, Lont says.

Minorities, men and women living hardscrabble lives rarely make it past the police reports. At least five gay men have gone missing from the Tampa area since 1995. Yet until investigators connected them to the rape, torture and killings of two other Tampa men, their disappearances went largely unnoticed by the media.

However, if all the elements are there - including a good hook to reel in the media - some contend a case quickly can become a national cause.

Tiffany Sessions, of Valrico, a pretty blond college student with well-connected parents, made national news after she disappeared Feb. 9, 1989, while on her daily power walk in Gainesville. CNN showed up. Former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, actor Robert Conrad, ``America's Most Wanted'' host John Walsh and Jeb Bush appeared in public service announcements pleading for her return.

The then-20-year-old University of Florida student has never been found.

You Need A Hook

Her mother, Hilary Sessions, turned grief into action. She has made more than 1,000 trips to Gainesville to follow up on tips and meet with police, she says. She has braved at least 170 visits to morgues to view unidentified bodies. She has consulted with psychics, lobbied Congress for stronger laws and devoted countless hours to volunteer work on behalf of missing children. She's the executive director of Children Protection Education of America, a nonprofit group based in Tampa.

Sessions acknowledges that there is bias in the media.

``Face it, you can't put them all out there because that's all the media would be reporting,'' she says.

In Florida in 2004, 51,000 children were reported missing. Many were runaways who came home within days or hours, so the media must be discriminating on what cases to pursue, she says.

With the disappearance of her daughter, an only child whose bedroom remains filled with stuffed animals, Sessions, 59, says she learned a lot getting the word out.

``It helps to have a compelling story. If you don't have a hook, you won't get the media,'' she says. ``And when you get the media, don't be a blathering crybaby in front of the camera, no matter how emotional you feel. You need to get your point across at an elevated level in order to connect to mainstream America.''

A competent and articulate spokesman helps, says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at The Poynter Ins ute, a journalism studies center in St. Petersburg. Also, it doesn't hurt to have powerful video or compelling photos of the victim that can tug at the emotions of strangers.

``The media is more likely to respond if the family can provide the elements they need,'' she says. ``Images definitely drive news stories, especially in the age of the Internet, where words are devalued.''

Smart, of Utah, was a classic case, McBride says. A beautiful, talented girl from a religious, well-to-do family gets snatched from her bed in the middle of the night. It's not a messy custody battle. It's a mystery, and it's every parent's nightmare.

And it fits neatly into a story that can be told in a short amount of time and space to a broad audience, McBride says. The simpler and more clear- cut the story is, the better it plays nationally.

Mother And Child Vanish

It's not all about the family, though, McBride adds. If law enforcement doesn't raise an alarm about a case, the media may be equally dismissive. It's up to reporters to dig a little deeper and ask appropriate questions: Why isn't there more urgency on this case? Do you know something we don't know?

``Sometimes, there's too much readiness to buy into the law enforcement line,'' she says.

Bonnie Lee Dages and her son got little press or air time, despite the compelling elements of their story.

When the two first disappeared, two area newspapers (including The Tampa Tribune) ran a short news brief. A few segments aired on Bay area TV stations. Later in the year, a couple of longer articles appeared, and after that, their names occasionally cropped up in other stories.

Not long before she vanished, Dages had inherited a good sum of money, ``less than $50,000, but still in five figures,'' a Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokesman said a few days after her disappearance. On April 28, she withdrew $15,075 from the bank and went to meet a friend.

That was the last time anyone saw her.

Her 1986 silver Dodge Caravan was found two days later in a parking lot at a Kash n' Karry at Lumsden and Lithia- Pinecrest roads, with her purse and the baby's diaper bag locked inside.

``It's as if they vanished into thin air,'' says sheriff's Capt. Craig Latimer. ``We got nothing. It's not only a case of who- done-it, it's a case of where-is- it.''

Sheriff's deputies conducted more than 700 interviews on the case, consulted a psychic, and searched for the pair by helicopter, mounted posse and on foot, Latimer says. From the beginning, the disappearance was labeled su ious.

The case remains open, although leads nearly have come to a standstill. The last activity came on May 24, 2004, when the remains of an unidentified female were found in Pennsylvania. Another dead end.

An Angry, Grieving Father

For Larry Dages, 59, the loss of his daughter and first grandchild is a pain that never goes away. It's even worse this week, as he faces yet another Father's Day without his child, the eldest of five for him and his wife, Linda.

After six years, he had Bonnie Lee and Jeremy declared legally dead. But with no bodies and no answers, it didn't make things any easier.

``I get waking nightmares, the kind that come during the day,'' Dages says. He believes his daughter was killed, and he has an idea who did it, but investigators never could prove it.

He still has a lot of anger. He doesn't think deputies really cared about solving the case or demonstrated much urgency. They were judgmental about her being a single, teenage mother, he says.

Dages, a farrier by trade, admits he wasn't always an articulate spokesman during the few opportunities when he had the media's attention. Sometimes he ranted and raved; other times he broke down and cried. It's hard to be eloquent in the midst of so much frustration, he says.

He had one moment in the national spotlight. A year after Bonnie Lee and Jeremy disappeared, Dages got to tell his story on ``The Montel Williams Show.'' No other media followed up.

He doesn't fault the missing people who get national media attention. The media like sexy stories, he says, and maybe theirs just didn't cut it. Fairness is something he no longer expects from life. Now he's more concerned about justice.

``I do believe the killer will be caught one day,'' he says. ``I just hope it happens in my lifetime, that's all.''

[CaptainHook]

Spotlight skips cases of missing minorities

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...norities_x.htm

By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

Tamika Huston's family reported her missing a year ago this week.
Tamika Huston has not been seen since June 2004. She disappeared from the Spartanburg, S.C., area.



When police in Spartanburg, S.C., began investigating the 24-year-old woman's disappearance, her loved ones swung into action. They distributed fliers, held news conferences and set up a Web site. Huston's story became a cause célèbre in the local media. (Related story: Aruban police search home of Dutch teen)

Huston lived alone and obviously hadn't been home for days, if not a week or two. Her dog, Macy, had given birth to puppies.

Rebkah Howard, Huston's aunt and a public relations professional in Miami, tried to get the national media interested in the case. "I spent three weeks calling the cable networks, calling newspapers — even yours," Howard said this week.

Not much happened.

Last August, Fox News Channel's On the Record with Greta Van Susteren briefly noted Huston's disappearance. Fox network's America's Most Wanted did a story about the case in March (it will be repeated this Saturday). National Public Radio did a report last month that, like this story, focused on the lack of interest in Huston's case.

Now, the disappearance of Alabama high school student Natalee Holloway, 18, in Aruba is getting lots of airtime on the cable news networks and morning news shows. Those networks, which drive such stories, are being asked a tough question: Do they care only about missing white women?

Holloway, like "runaway bride" Jennifer Wilbanks, murder victims Laci Peterson and Lori Hacking, kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart and several other girls and women whose stories got significant airtime in recent years, is white.

Tamika Huston is black.

Cable news executives say they don't pick stories based on the race of the victims. "The stories that 'go national' all have a twist or an emotional aspect to them that make them interesting," said Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming at Fox News.

"When the Aruba story broke, I didn't know if she (Holloway) was white," said Mark Effron, vice president of news/daytime programming at MSNBC.

He said he saw a story about "a parent's worst nightmare."

'Victims of a certain type'

Others say race has to be at least a subconscious factor:

• "Something is at work here, at a conscious or at least subconscious level, that leads them to choose victims of a certain type" to report about, said Eugene Robinson, syndicated columnist and associate editor at The Washington Post, who recently wrote about the issue.

• "Sometimes we become advocates for their families," said Philip Lerman, co-executive producer of America's Most Wanted and a former editor at USA TODAY. "It's stunning sometimes how hard it is to get the national media interested when it's a minority."

Why would national media ignore minorities? Among the most important reasons is a lack of diversity in newsrooms, say Robinson, Lerman and Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Ins ute, a school for journalists.

"I'm not complaining about the story out of Aruba. I'm complaining about the stories that don't get told" because many reporters, editors and news producers identify more with people like them, who are white, Woods said.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors estimates 13% of journalists at newspapers are minorities (including Hispanics). In TV newsrooms, minorities make up about 22% of the workforce, according to the Radio-Television News Directors Association. About 32% of the U.S. population is non-white or Hispanic.

Woods and others say the media mislead the public about "typical" victims. FBI statistics show that men are slightly more likely than women to be reported as missing, and that blacks make up a disproportionately large segment of the victims. As of May 1, there were 25,389 men in the FBI's database of active missing persons cases, and 22,200 cases of women. Blacks accounted for 13,860 cases, vs. 29,383 whites.

The media spotlight can distort news in other ways, too. Other international destinations are more dangerous than Aruba. The State Department warned in April that 30 U.S. citizens had recently been kidnapped or murdered in Mexico.

Media influence

Media attention can affect how local authorities handle a case.

Detective Dwayne Baird, spokesman for the Salt Lake City police, has been through two rounds with the national media. Local teenager Elizabeth Smart, missing since November 2001, was found alive in March 2003. Last year, Lori Hacking, 27, was murdered by her husband. Both stories brought hundreds of journalists to the city.

Did the attention spur local police to request help from the FBI?

"Probably," Baird said. "We typically would ask for help from the FBI if they have resources that we don't have access to. But national attention can drive that issue. You can't stand before the public on a national story and say, 'We've got three guys dedicated to this, and sooner or later, we'll figure it out.' "

The FBI does not offer to get involved in missing persons probes because they're getting national attention, said spokesman Joe Parris, a supervisory special agent. The bureau "will get involved only if we have original jurisdiction or if we're invited in by a state, local or international partner," he said.

Howard conceded it's unlikely her niece is alive. This year, Huston's blood was found in an acquaintance's apartment. No suspect has been charged. National attention might generate clues, however. What Huston's family is asking for, Howard said, is balance.

"If you were dropped on to this planet you'd think there's a strange thing going on, where only young white women are missing," Howard said. "That's not true."

[Dan Rather]

That is not news.

[SWC Bonfire]

The media is not blindly unbiased?

If it ain't a little blonde girl, it ain't news.

[mookie2001]

10 years ago jonbenet ramsey forum