Look! A White Woman is Missing!
Some of the names that come to mind include Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking, Audrey Seiler, and the "Runaway Bride" Jennifer Wilbanks. For some reason, though, the recent case of Natalee Holloway in Aruba is making more of an impact on me. Perhaps it's because this isn't even occurring in America — it's as if there aren't enough missing white women in America so they have to find missing white women abroad in order to create a distraction from the more important issues.
Why does the media spend so much time focusing on missing white women? I was watching CNN this morning where Bill Hemmer was grilling a lawyer about details of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway, the Alabama student who has gone missing in Aruba. Then they went to the "verdict watch" in the Michael Jackson trial (Jackson may not be missing, but the rest is the subject of some debate). Then they announced even more coverage about Holloway would be coming up later in the broadcast.
On CNN's home page, information about Holloway is the main story. Among all the stories at the top, none deal with Iraq or the war on terrorism today. One deals with a report on "missed opportunities" before 9/11. I scroll down... and I still don't see anything about Iraq. The closest thing to a story about terrorism and war is a report on Bush's demand that the Patriot Act be renewed.
In contrast, doing a search on CNN reveals that the most recent story dealing with the Downing Street Memo was from several days ago — and that was a report of Bush's denials of any truth to the memo. Why isn't Bill Hemmer grilling government officials about the memo? Why isn't Bill Hemmer grilling people about Guantanamo? Is the story of Natalee Holloway really so much more important that they have to use several news segments every morning on her absence instead of on things like the Downing Street Memo?
Now, I'm not trying to minimize the grief and suffering of the families of missing women and I'm certainly not trying to say that such stories should simply be ignored. There is certainly a place and time for these stories to be reported on — with an emphasis on place and time. The media, however, seems to be minimizing everything else by focusing on these stories day after day after day to the exclusion of so much else that is either at least as important (missing non-white women) or far more important (Iraq).
The media doesn't leave a stone unturned or angle unreported-on when it comes to a story of a missing white woman (Bill Hemmer just did a segment on the differences between the American legal system and the Dutch legal system in Aruba). Every time, they go to such lengths that they start being criticized for going overboard on their coverage... then they start covering the criticism (by that point, there's nothing else left). Then, a month or two later, the cycle starts over. I think it's fair to wonder why they don't exhibit the same zeal, attention, and interest when it comes to other stories.
Update: Eugene Robinson (via Kevin Drum) writes about this today as well, calling it a "Damsel in Distress" syndrome:
A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as "petite," and it also helps if she's the kind of woman who wouldn't really mind being called "petite," a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive -- also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).
Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we've had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I'd wager, than in the preceding 10 years.
Broadening the subject from "Missing White Women" to "Damsels in Distress" would mean including more cases, like for example Terri Schiavo, in the equation. This makes sense because all these stories have something much more fundamental in common than the superficial question of whether a woman is missing or not:
It's the meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the bedroom window. It's whiteness under siege. It's innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It's a flower smashed by a rock.
Whatever our ultimate reason for singling out these few unfortunate victims, among the thousands of Americans who are murdered or who vanish each year, the pattern of choosing only young, white, middle-class women for the full damsel treatment says a lot about a nation that likes to believe it has consigned race and class to irrelevance.
One of the interesting things about this issue is that there is no one person or even one group (including the media) who can be said are to blame for this. Lots of people contribute in lots of different ways. One action feeds off of another — one media outlet plays this sort of things a bit more, gets ratings, so other media outlets have to follow suit. Different aspects of the cases are hyped in order for media outlets to differentiate themselves from each other.
The problem is arguably structural — but in which social structure can we identify the cause? The concentration of more media outlets into fewer hands is probably one factor, but as Robinson says we are also dealing with deeply ingrained problems involving race and class which are, in turn, part of larger social structures outside this particular issue. The "Damsel in Distress," the intense and inexplicable focus on White Women Gone Missing, is a symptom of other, more serious social issues.
But how many people are paying attention?
Comments
It is incredible that in 2 years nobody left a single comment in here. That answers your last question.
How sad. Thank you so much for writing this article it made me aware of something that I didn’t think about before. I appreciate it.