Okay, so picture this. It's, you know, a Tuesday
night. Maybe it's 7 o 'clock. You've just finished
dinner. Dishes are done. You're finally sitting
down to unwind. Yep, I know that feeling. And
you flip on the TV or... Let's be real. You're
probably just scrolling on your phone, Twitter,
TikTok, whatever. And then you see it, that red
banner, breaking news. It always gets you. That
little jolt, the music changes, the whole tone
shifts. Exactly. It demands your attention. And
there's a face on the screen. It's usually a
photo, maybe pulled from Instagram, probably
a selfie or graduation picture. And the headline
is huge, missing. And just like that, everything
kind of stops. We've all seen it. Yeah. And you
immediately feel that pit in your stomach. You
see the search parties. You hear about the helicopters.
You see the family pleading at a press conference.
It's a it's a really compelling and obviously
tragic story. But just pause there for a second.
I want you listening right now to really visualize
that face. The face you usually see when a case
gets that wall to wall, 247 cable news treatment.
If we're being totally honest with ourselves,
who are we usually looking at? Well, if we're
going by the last, say. Two decades of media
coverage. Statistically, you are probably picturing
a young woman. Young woman. A young white woman,
probably attractive, probably from a middle class
or upper middle class background. The girl next
door, if you will. And that right there is a
really uncomfortable thing we're going to get
into today. It's a pattern that I think a lot
of us feel. You know, it's like this glitch we've
all noticed, but maybe haven't put a name to.
But it's not just a feeling. It's a documented,
studied phenomenon. It has a name, it has a history,
and it has some really, really devastating consequences.
We are talking about missing white woman syndrome.
And it's a term that I know makes people bristle.
It sounds accusatory. It does. But this deep
dive isn't about blaming viewers or even diminishing
the absolute tragedy of any single person who
goes missing. It's about looking at a huge systemic
bias in our media. It's a phrase that social
scientists use to describe this massive disproportionate
coverage given to missing young white affluent
women. Compared to, well, everyone else. Exactly.
Compared to men, compared to people of color,
and very specifically compared to women of color.
It's about who gets that prime time slot and
who gets, you know, maybe a brief mention on
the local news at 11 if they're lucky. And today
we're not just going on feelings. We have a whole
stack of research here. We have studies from
Northwestern. We have FBI data. We have reports
from the UK, Canada. We're going to peel back
all layers. We're going to look at what makes
the perfect victim for a news producer. We're
going to talk about something called racial grammar.
That one really jumped out at me. Racial grammar.
Yeah. And we'll look at cases that happened at
the exact same time in the exact same place that
were almost identical on paper. But the media
treated them like they were from different planets.
And maybe the most important part, we're going
to see how all this coverage, all this attention
actually ends up writing our laws. Because what
happens on TV, it doesn't just stay there. Not
at all. It changes policy. It changes policing.
It changes who our society decides is worth protecting.
So welcome to the deep dive. Let's start at the
beginning. Because this phrase, missing white
woman syndrome, it sounds very modern, right?
Like something that started on a blog or as a
hashtag. You'd think so, but no. It actually
comes from the highest echelons of journalism.
From someone who was in the room where it happened,
so to speak. Exactly. We have to go back to 2004.
The setting is the unity. Journalists of color
conference. And on a panel is the absolute legend,
Gwen Enkephil. I mean. A titan of the industry.
PBS, NBC. She knew how the sausage was made.
She knew everything. She saw the budgets. She
saw the rundowns. She knew which stories got
killed and which ones got a primetime special.
And she just cut right through all the jargon
and said it. She said, I call it the missing
white woman search syndrome. Wow. Just laid it
out there. Laid it out there. And her next sentence
is the key. She said, if there is a missing white
woman, we're going to cover that every day. Every
day. That's the part. It's not just that it gets
covered once. It's the. The serialization of
it. The commitment. That's the word. The commitment
to the narrative. She was pointing out that a
white woman's tragedy becomes a national drama
series with daily updates. But a tragedy in a
black or brown community, it's treated as a local
crime blotter item. A statistic. It's the difference
between being the lead story and being on the
ticker at the bottom of the screen. Precisely.
Gwen Ifill gave a name to a feeling that so many
people had for decades, that their loved ones
just didn't matter as much to the people running
the cameras. Okay, so let's get into the anatomy
of this. If we were, and I know this sounds cynical,
but if we were a cable news producer casting
for our next big missing person story, what's
the profile? What are the specs for the perfect
victim? Well, the archetype is often called the
damsel in distress. And the criteria are surprisingly
specific. First, the obvious demographics. Young,
white, and conventionally attractive. Right.
Not just attractive, but attractive in a very
specific, non -threatening, mainstream way. Yes.
But it's more than that. It's about class. And
this is crucial. Perceived innocence. The victim
has to be seen as worthy of a national rescue
effort. Worthy? What does that mean in this context?
It generally means she's from an upper middle
class background. She's a student or has a respectable
job. She comes from a stable two -parent family.
There's no criminal record, no hint of a messy
life. The girl with the bright future, the one
who lit up every room she walked into. You hear
those phrases over and over. Every single time.
It's part of the script. But let's look at what
happens when some of those boxes aren't checked,
because I think some people might hear this and
think it's only about race. But you found a case
that shows how class and this idea of innocence
are just as important. The case of Tiffany Witten.
This is such a heartbreaking and telling example.
It was detailed in the 2016 Esquire article.
Tiffany Wynn was a 26 -year -old white woman
from Georgia who went missing. So on the surface,
you see her picture, you think, OK, young white
woman, this fits. Right. So according to the
theory, she should have been on every news channel.
She should have been. But there was almost total
media silence. And the reason why tells you everything
you need to know. So what was different about
her? Tiffany's life wasn't neat. It wasn't the
perfect victim narrative. She was a mother, but
she was also struggling with drug addiction.
She was unemployed at the time she disappeared.
She was on parole for theft. Ah, so she wasn't
the innocent damsel. In the eyes of a news producer,
she was complicated. Her story wasn't a simple
good versus evil fairy tale. In 24 -hour news...
They hate complicated. It muddies the narrative.
It does. And her mother's experience trying to
get coverage was just brutal. She said she reached
out to producers for major crime shows. She even
mentioned The Nancy Grace Show, which at the
time was the absolute epicenter of this kind
of coverage. Oh, yeah. If you were a missing
white woman, that was your prime time slot. And
according to Tiffany's mother, the producers
basically told her they weren't interested. They
just said that to the mother of a missing person.
Sorry, not interested. That was the allegation,
yes. Because her story didn't fit the mold. The
journalist who wrote the piece, Tom Junod, he
called the media's selection process ruthlessly
selective. He argued that as soon as you introduce
things like addiction or a criminal record, the
audience's sympathy starts to curdle into judgment.
You stop seeing the victim as someone like your
own daughter and you start seeing them as someone
who made bad choices. Exactly. The narrative
shifts from let's find her to. What did she do
to get into this situation? It's like you're
casting a character in a movie. And if the hero
has too many flaws, you think the audience won't
root for them. So you just you don't make the
movie. That is a perfect, if chilling way to
put it. And this whole selection process, it
relies on this underlying structure. A sociologist
named Eduardo Bonilla Silva has a term for it
that you mentioned earlier. Racial grammar. It's
such a powerful phrase. It really stuck with
me. Can you break down what he means by that?
Sure. So think about grammar in English. It's
the set of invisible rules that we all follow
to make sense. We don't consciously think, okay,
subject, verb, object. We just talk. And if someone
uses bad grammar, it just sounds wrong to our
ears. That's intuitive. Right. Bonilla -Silva
argues that our society has a racial grammar,
an invisible set of rules that we all learn,
which treats whiteness as the default, the normal,
the universal standard. So a white person's story
is just a human story, but a black person's story
is specifically a black story. You've got it.
So when a white woman is in danger, the racial
grammar frames it as a universal tragedy that
should concern everyone. The implied message
is this could be your daughter, your sister,
no matter who you are. We're all expected to
see ourselves in her. But that empathy is not
expected to flow the other way. Never. The grammar
tells us that violence against a black woman
is a community -specific problem. It's a them
problem, not an us problem. It's seen as, sadly,
more normal, more expected. It's a background
noise versus a siren. That's a great way to put
it. Charlton McIlwain, a professor at NYU. He
says that white women hold this privileged position
in our culture as the ultimate victims of violent
crime. They are the figures who are supposed
to be protected above all others. So when that
system fails, it's a profound shock to the social
order. But when a black woman is harmed, the
culture sort of tragically shrugs and says, well,
what do you expect in those neighborhoods? The
racial grammar has already coded her as less
valuable, less innocent. less worthy of a national
panic. It is literally the difference between
a tragedy and a statistic. That's it in a nutshell.
OK, so I want to play devil's advocate for a
minute for the skeptic listening who's thinking,
OK, this all sounds plausible. I see the logic.
But is it real or is this just confirmation bias?
Do we just remember the big high profile cases
like Leslie Peterson and forget all the others?
We need the data. And that's the right question
to ask. For a long time, this was just an observation,
an anecdote. But then in 2016, a sociologist
at Northwestern University named Zach Summers
decided to actually quantify it. OK, so how do
you even do that? How do you measure media intensity?
That seems so subjective. It's a really smart
study design. What Summers did was he took two
data sets. On one hand, he had the FBI's official
missing persons database. That's the ground truth.
That's who is actually. factually missing in
the United States. The reality. The reality.
On the other hand, he compiled all the news coverage
of missing persons from four major media outlets,
CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and a major regional paper,
the Atlanta Journal -Constitution. So he's comparing
what's on the screen to what's in the FBI's files.
Exactly. He was looking for the gaps, the discrepancies,
and he found two huge things. Okay. What was
the first? The first was just about baseline
visibility. He found that black people of all
ages and genders were disproportionately less
likely to be mentioned in the news at all compared
to how often they go missing. So there's a blackout
right from the start. So if you're a black person
who's gone missing, your odds of even getting
a single mention are already lower. Much lower.
But the second finding is the one that really
gets to the syndrome part. He measured the intensity
of the coverage. And what does that mean? Like
minutes of airtime. It means number of articles
per case, the duration of the coverage over days
or weeks, whether the story got updates. And
he found that when a missing white woman does
get covered, the nature of that coverage is fundamentally
different. It's more intense. It's stickier.
So a missing black teenager might get a single
30 -second report. Police are looking for so
-and -so. She was last seen here. Call this number.
End of story. Right. But a missing white woman
gets the whole package. Day five of the search.
A look inside her diary. An exclusive interview
with her best friend. Tonight, a candlelight
vigil. It becomes a recurring series. A drama
that unfolds for the audience night after night.
And that repetition is what lodges a victim in
the public consciousness. You see a face once
on the news. You forget it an hour later. You
see that same face every night for three weeks.
You start to feel like you know her. You become
personally invested in the outcome. And you feel
like you're part of the search. Exactly. You
feel a stake in it. Now, there was another study
you sent over that I thought was fascinating
because it adds a really important layer of nuance
here. The 2019 study by Slakoff and Fridella.
Because we tend to frame this as a simple black
versus white issue. Right. And they found it's
a little more complex than that. They looked
at the news coverage and found something really
unexpected. It wasn't just a case of white women
get all the coverage and women of color get none.
OK, so what did they find? They found that in
their sample. Non -black women of color, so specifically
Asian and Latina women, were actually represented
at rates pretty similar to white women, sometimes
even slightly overrepresented compared to their
missing person statistics. Really? So the invisibility
isn't applied equally across all non -white groups?
Not in the same way, which led them to their
big conclusion. They argued that missing white
woman syndrome is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer.
A misnomer. So what did they propose instead?
They suggested that a more accurate name for
the phenomenon would be the specific underrepresentation
of black women's syndrome. Wow. That really,
that puts a much finer point on it. It's not
just a preference for whiteness. It's a specific
and measurable anti -blackness. The data really
backs that up. In their study sample, black women
and girls accounted for over a third more than
33 % of all the actual missing persons cases.
A third of all missing women and girls are black.
Yes. But they only accounted for about 20 % of
the news stories. Yeah. That is a massive, massive
gap between reality and representation. You're
basically erasing one out of every three black
victims from the public narrative. Let's ground
this in the big FBI numbers for a second, just
so people can really understand the scale of
what we're talking about. This isn't a few dozen
cases a year. No, not even close. The FBI's National
Crime Information Center, the NCIC, in 2020 alone
had over 540 ,000 active missing person files
entered into its system. Half a million people.
In one year, that's the entire population of
a city like Sacramento or Atlanta, just gone.
It's staggering. And when you break down those
540 ,000 files by race, the disparity is just
impossible to ignore. In that 2020 data, Black
people made up roughly 35 % of all missing person
files. 35%. Let's repeat that. And to put that
in context, black people make up about 13 % of
the U .S. population. Correct. So they are overrepresented
in the missing population by almost a factor
of three. While being, as we just established,
massively underrepresented in the news coverage.
The very definition of a crisis that is being
ignored. Now, compare that to white people, including
Hispanics in this particular FBI grouping. They
made up about 61 percent of the missing files.
OK, 61 percent. But they represent close to 80
percent of the U .S. population. So white people
are actually underrepresented in the missing
persons data relative to their share of the population.
So this is what you were saying earlier. It's
a complete inversion of reality. If your only
source of information was the evening news, you
would be convinced that the single greatest danger
in America is being a young white woman. You'd
be terrified for them. You'd think they were
being abducted constantly. When in reality, the
data clearly shows that black Americans, and
particularly black women, are going missing at
a far, far higher rate. And we just don't talk
about it. It's a curated reality designed to
focus our fear and our sympathy on one specific
group while rendering another group suffering
invisible. So that brings us to the big question.
Why? Why does the media do this? We talked about
the damsel archetype, but let's dig into the
psychology of how these stories are told. Because
it can't just be that news producers are sitting
in a room thinking, let's be racist today. They're
chasing an audience. They're chasing ratings.
So what is it about these specific narratives
that hooks us? A lot of it comes down to a really
simple but powerful binary. Blame versus innocence.
Sociologists argue that the media frames victims
differently by race in order to tap into pre
-existing societal biases and stereotypes. Okay,
so lay it out for us. What does the typical white
narrative sound like compared to the black narrative?
When a white woman goes missing, the story is
always framed as a story of loss. The coverage
focuses on her positive roles in the community.
The things we mentioned. She's a mother. She's
a beloved teacher. A straight -A student. Exactly.
She volunteered at the animal shelter. The subtext,
the unspoken message is, her life has value to
all of us. Her absence leaves a hole in the fabric
of society, and we must find her to repair it.
And the black narrative, assuming there even
is one. Assuming there is one. If the story gets
any airtime at all, it often pivots very quickly
to focus on pathology or risk. What do you mean
by that? The reporting will subtly or not so
subtly introduce details that imply she was in
some way responsible for her own fate. They'll
mention she had a troubled past or she was last
seen arguing with her boyfriend or it happened
in a high crime neighborhood. So it's victim
blaming baked right into the reporting. It's
pure victim blaming. The subtext shifts entirely.
It's no longer this is a terrible tragedy. It
becomes this is the unfortunate but perhaps predictable
consequence of her lifestyle. Wow. And once you
do that, you give the audience an out. You give
them permission not to care. You absolutely do.
You absolve them of the responsibility of empathy.
Because if she's partly to blame, then we don't
need to mount a national search party for her.
It's not our problem anymore. It's tragic. But
it's her tragedy, not ours. It's a way of stripping
the humanity from the victim to justify our own
inaction. And it feeds into this idea that Kim
Pasqualini from the National Center for Missing
Adults talked about. She called it the woman
in jeopardy genre. A genre. Like, it's entertainment.
Well, that's the uncomfortable truth, isn't it?
We consume these stories like they're the latest
season of a true crime docuseries. We watch them
like episodes of Law & Order. And for that show
to work, for the ratings to be good, you need
a protagonist the audience can root for. You
need the perfect damsel. It even applies outside
of missing persons cases, doesn't it? I'm thinking
of some of the huge murder trials. Amanda Knox.
Jodi Arias. Casey Anthony. Oh, absolutely. That's
the other side of the coin. Even when the young,
attractive white woman is the accused, the villain
of the story, she is still the star. She's still
the center of the universe. The national obsession.
We dissect her motives, her looks, her diary.
We give her a primetime special, a Netflix deal.
But a black woman accused of a similar crime.
She's just a criminal. There's no glamour, no
intrigue, no multi -part series exploring her
psyche. The damsel can be in distress or she
can be the femme fatale. But either way, she
is always the main character. Always. And this
is where we have to bring in the concept of intersectionality.
I know it's a word that gets thrown around a
lot, but it is the perfect analytical tool for
this. It was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, right,
to explain this exact kind of situation. Exactly.
It explains why black women specifically fall
through the tracks of our cultural concern. A
black woman faces racism. which devalues her
life in a society structured around whiteness.
And she faces sexism, which makes all women vulnerable
to certain types of violence. But it's a combination
of the two. It's the compounding effect. She
doesn't have the racial privilege that protects
white women, and she doesn't have the male privilege
that can, in some ways, shield men. She exists
at the intersection of two forms of marginalization,
and that intersection is a blind spot for the
media. The place where nobody is looking. The
place where nobody is looking. This is a good
time to pivot to the comparative case studies
because talking about it in theory is one thing,
but when you see it happen in real time, it's
undeniable. You've pulled some examples where
it's like history ran its own A -B test. And
the most famous one, the one that I think really
opened a lot of people's eyes to this, is the
case of Lacey Peterson in 2002. I remember that
so vividly you couldn't escape it. Lacey Peterson.
Modesto, California. 27 years old. White. Eight
months pregnant. she disappears on Christmas
Eve. Yeah. I mean, from a news producer's perspective,
it had every possible element. The holiday angle,
the beautiful victim, the handsome, suspicious
husband, Scott Peterson. It was a perfect storm.
CNN basically became the Lexi Peterson network
for months on end. Absolutely. But at the exact
same time, in the exact same part of the world,
someone else disappeared. Yes. In that same year,
in the Bay Area, a woman named Evelyn Hernandez
went missing. Tell us about Evelyn. Evelyn Hernandez
was a 24 -year -old Hispanic woman. She was also
pregnant, nine months pregnant. She vanished
from San Francisco just an hour's drive from
Modesto. So an almost identical fact pattern.
Young, heavily pregnant, Bay Area, vanishes without
a trace. The parallels are uncanny. And they
get even more tragic. Lacey Peterson's body was
eventually discovered washed up in the San Francisco
Bay. Right, I remember that. Evelyn Hernandez's
torso was also found washed ashore. In the San
Francisco Bay. My God. It's the same story. It's
the same story. But the coverage could not have
been more different. Lacey Peterson became a
household name. There were vigils, magazine covers,
TV movies. There's literally a law named after
her and her unborn son. And Evelyn Hernandez.
A footnote. The local paper, the San Francisco
Chronicle, actually wrote an article at the time
pointing out the glaring disparity. But the national
media just, they didn't care. She didn't fit
the profile. What was different? Was it just
that she was Hispanic? That was a huge part of
it, of course. But her class and background also
played a role. She was a single mother, an immigrant
from El Salvador. She worked as a vocational
nurse. She didn't have that polished, suburban,
upper -middle -class life that Lacey did. She
wasn't the perfect victim. So the media looked
at her story and said, tragic, but not a blockbuster.
And they looked at Lacey's story and saw ratings
gold. That's the cold, hard truth of it. Let's
jump forward a few years to 2005, the year of
Natalie Holloway. The Aruba case, another one
that was just everywhere. An 18 -year -old white
girl from a wealthy suburb in Alabama goes missing
on a high school graduation trip. It was an absolutely
terrifying story, and it deserved coverage. But
the scale of the coverage was astronomical. It
was the story of the summer. I feel like some
cable news anchors built their entire careers
on that one story. It was on every single night
for months. It was. But in that same exact summer
in Philadelphia, a 25 -year -old woman named
Latoya Figueroa disappeared. Okay. Latoya was
black and Hispanic. She was five months pregnant.
She was already a mother to a young daughter.
And the coverage. Crickets. Absolute silence
from the national media. Her family was screaming
for help, trying to get anyone to pay attention.
It wasn't until a few bloggers and local activists
started raising hell online, specifically contrasting
her case with the wall -to -wall coverage of
Natalie Holloway, that the story got any traction.
So they had to shame the media into covering
it. They had to. And even then, when CNN finally
did a segment, the segment itself was framed
as, why is no one covering the LaToya Figueroa
case? Oh, that's so cynical. Yeah. So they didn't
just cover her story. They covered the controversy
around the lack of coverage. Precisely. They
made the metanarrative the story, instead of
just centering the missing pregnant woman of
color and helping her family find her. It was
a brief moment of media self -reflection, but
it didn't actually translate into sustained,
intense coverage for Latoya herself. There's
one more case in the section that I think is
maybe the most bizarre and revealing of them
all. Because it shows how this bias is so ingrained,
the media will literally invent a crime to fit
the narrative. This is the blonde angel case
from Greece. Oh, this one is just, it's infuriating
on every level. So this is 2013. Greek police
conduct a raid on a Roma settlement, what many
people would pejoratively call a gypsy camp.
Okay. And inside one of the homes, they find
a little girl. She's about four years old. And
she has platinum blonde hair, fair skin and blue
eyes. And she's living with a Roma family who
are typically darker skinned. Exactly. And the
police and then instantly the global media, they
take one look at this little blonde child among
these brown skinned people and they jump to a
single immediate conclusion. She must have been
kidnapped. She must be a stolen white child.
They literally nicknamed her the blonde angel.
The story went viral worldwide. Who is this lost
little angel abducted by gypsies? It played into
every single racist centuries -old stereotype
you can imagine. And calls started pouring in
from all over the world, Brad. Thousands of them.
Parents of missing children from the U .S., from
the U .K., from all over Europe were calling
Greek authorities thinking maybe, just maybe,
this was their long -lost daughter. So what was
the actual truth? The truth came from a DNA test
a few days later. The little girl was Roma. Her
biological mother was an impoverished Roma woman
from Bulgaria. The family she was living with
hadn't kidnapped her. Her mother had given the
child to them in an informal adoption because
she couldn't afford to care for her. There was
no crime. She wasn't a stolen white child at
all. She was just a pale -skinned Roma girl living
with other Roma people. The entire international
news frenzy was a complete fabrication, built
entirely on the color of a child's skin and hair.
A Romani rights activist made such a powerful
point at the time. He said, imagine the reverse.
Imagine if police raided a wealthy white suburban
home and found a brown -skinned child living
there. They would never assume kidnapping. They'd
assume the family adopted the child. Of course.
That's the default assumption. Whiteness is coded
as normal and rightful owner, while brownness
is coded as suspicious and criminal. The blonde
angel case is the ultimate proof that the media
is so hungry for the missing white woman narrative
that it will hallucinate one into existence even
when it's not there. That's a perfect way to
put it. The bias is so strong it actually hallucinates
crimes that fit its worldview. Yes. Let's touch
on one final comparison here because it takes
the concept out of the realm of domestic crime
and into war and military heroism. The story
of Jessica Lynch. This is a masterclass in how
narratives are constructed by the media and in
this case by the military's PR machine. So it's
2003, the early days of the Iraq War. An American
Army convoy makes a wrong turn and gets ambushed.
I remember this being one of the first big dramatic
stories of that war. It was. And there are three
female soldiers in one of the Humvees who are
central to this story. There's Private Jessica
Lynch, who is 19, white and blonde. There's Specialist
Shoshana Johnson, who is black and a single mother.
And there's Private First Class Lori Pistua,
who is Hopi indigenous and also a single mother.
All in the same vehicle, all in the same ambush.
All in the same ambush. In the attack, Lori Pistua
fought back fiercely but was killed. She became
the first Native American woman in U .S. history
to die in combat. Shoshana Johnson was shot in
both of her ankles and taken as a prisoner of
war. Jessica Lynch sustained serious injuries
in the crash and was also taken prisoner. Three
women, one killed, two captured, three heroes.
But who did the media turn into a global icon?
Jessica Lynch. And only Jessica Lynch. The initial
reports, fueled by leaks in the Pentagon, painted
her as this Rambo -like figure who went down
fighting, firing her weapon until she was out
of ammunition. They focused on her youth, her
blonde hair, her small -town West Virginia roots.
The perfect all -American girl hero. She was
turned into a living legend overnight. But here's
the most incredible part of the story. When Jessica
Lynch was finally rescued and brought home, she
refused to play along with the myth. Right. She
herself pushed back against the hero narrative.
She did, and with incredible courage. She testified
before Congress, and she said, and I'm quoting
her here, I am still confused as to why they
chose to lie and tried to make me a legend. She
explicitly used her platform to correct the record
and to honor her fellow soldiers. He said people
like Laurie Pistoie and Jashana Johnson were
the real heroes that Laurie fought until the
very end. It's just so powerful when the person
who is being elevated by this biased system turns
around and says, stop looking at me. Look at
the people of color next to me whose stories
you are erasing. It's the ultimate confirmation
that this focus isn't accidental. It is a deliberate
choice, a choice to center the white narrative,
even on a battlefield where everyone is supposed
to be wearing the same uniform. OK, so we've
spent a lot of time on the U .S. context. Let's
broaden the lens. Is this a uniquely American
problem? Or is this something that we see in
other Western countries as well? It is absolutely
an international phenomenon, especially in countries
with similar racial and colonial histories. You
see the same patterns play out in the UK, in
Canada, even in a place like South Africa. All
right, let's go to the UK first. What's the parallel
there? In the UK, the most frequently cited example
is the stark contrast between the Soham murders
and the murder of a boy named Damalola Taylor.
Okay, can you remind us of the details of those
cases? The Soham murders happened in 2002. Two
10 year old white girls, Holly Wells and Jessica
Chapman, were murdered by a school caretaker.
It was a national trauma. The entire country
came to a standstill. The media coverage was
just absolute saturation for weeks and weeks.
That's understandable. The murder of two 10 year
olds is a horrific story. It is a horrific story.
But in that same general time period in 2000,
a 10 year old black boy named Jamalola Taylor
was stabbed to death on his way home from the
library in South London. Another horrific story.
And the media reaction. It was so muted in comparison
that it actually caused a public scandal. The
disparity was so obvious and so offensive that.
Sir Ian Blair, who was the commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, so we're talking about the
top police officer in all of London, he publicly
called out the media for it. The head of the
police called them out. Yes. He flat out accused
the British press of institutional racism. He
said, quote, It is a simple fact that murders
in minority communities do not seem to interest
the mainstream media. He talked about how he
had to practically beg for coverage for Damolola
Taylor while the Soham girls were rightly, on
every front page every single day. To have the
head of the police say that, that's an incredible
admission from inside the system. It's a damning
indictment. And you see another level of this
in the UK with class, too. People contrast the
coverage of Millie Dowler, a white middle -class
schoolgirl who was murdered, with that of Hannah
Williams, a white working -class girl who was
also murdered. Hannah had a nose cut, estranged
parents. She didn't fit the perfect victim profile,
and her case got far less attention. So it's
that same intersection of race and class and
perceived innocence playing out there, too. Exactly
the same. OK, what about Canada? In Canada, the
conversation is dominated by the crisis of missing
and murdered indigenous women and girls, often
abbreviated as MMIWG. This has become a huge
national issue in Canada in recent years, a focus
of their truth and reconciliation effort. It
has, finally. But for decades upon decades, it
was a silent epidemic. And the research on the
media disparity there is just... Staggering.
A 2008 study looked at the data and found that
an indigenous woman who goes missing in Canada
receives, on average, 27 times less newspaper
coverage than a missing white woman. Wait, say
that number again. 27 times less. That's not
a gap. That's a black hole. It's a complete erasure.
And the study also analyzed the tone of the coverage.
It found that the few articles that were written
about missing indigenous women were brief, dispassionate,
and read like a police report. Woman, age 32,
missing. Last seen wearing a blue jacket. Just
the facts. No humanity. Zero humanity. But the
articles about missing white women were overflowing
with it. They were emotional, detailed, filled
with quotes from family and friends talking about
her dreams and her personality. It's the difference
between reporting on a lost item and reporting
on a lost human being. That's precisely it. And
finally, let's look at South Africa. This one
is really interesting because it's a black majority
country. But the legacy of apartheid means that
media ownership and cultural power still often
reflect the old racial hierarchy. And the case
that brings this into focus is the Oster Pistorius
trial. Right. The Blade Runner, a global celebrity
who murdered his girlfriend, Reva Steenkamp,
a famous white model. It became the O .J. Simpson
trial of South Africa. It was broadcast live
around the world. But there is a parallel case
there as well. Yes. At roughly the same time,
another beautiful South African model named Zanella
Kumalo was brutally murdered by her boyfriend
under very similar circumstances. Let me guess.
She was black and the story got no international
attention. Not only no international attention,
but very little sustained national attention
in South Africa itself. A South African government
official named Sandal Mumla wrote this scathing
op -ed about it. He said the media's obsession
with the white victim. Steenkamp, while ignoring
the agony of the black victim's family, the Kamala
family, amounted to structural racism. He argued
that even in a country where black people are
the vast majority, the media still operates as
if a white life is inherently more valuable and
more newsworthy. It's devastating how consistent
the pattern is. No matter the country, no matter
the context, the hierarchy seems to hold. It
does. Which brings us to what is maybe the most
critical part of this whole deep dive, the so
what question. It's easy to hear all this and
think, OK, the media. Media is biased. That's
terrible. But is it just about what's on TV?
Does it actually have tangible real world consequences?
Does it change the law? Does it change how police
departments allocate resources? It absolutely
changes the world. And the most obvious way it
does that is through legislation. Public outrage
driven by intense media coverage is one of the
most powerful forces in politics. When the public
is screaming about a particular type of crime,
politicians respond. They pass laws. And they
often name those laws after the victims who were
at the center of the media firestorm. Let's just
list a few. Megan's Law. Named after Megan Conka,
a young white girl. Jess's Law. Named after Jessica
Lunsford, a young white girl. Kaylee's Law. Named
after Kaylee Anthony, a young white girl. Lacey
and Connor's Law. Named after Lacey Peterson,
a white woman, and her unborn son. You see the
pattern. It's undeniable. It is. These named
laws are almost always tough on crime measures.
They create sex offender registries. They impose
mandatory minimum sentences. They increase penalties.
There are legislative responses born out of a
moral panic that is laser focused on the perceived
threat to white women and children. So because
the media elevates the stories of this one demographic.
Our entire legal framework for dealing with these
crimes gets built around protecting that specific
demographic. 100 percent. Meanwhile, the systemic
issues that lead to the disproportionate disappearance
and murder of black women or indigenous women,
things like poverty, domestic violence, lack
of social services, police indifference. Those
issues don't get the breaking news treatment,
so they don't get the named legislation. And
beyond the laws themselves, it has to affect
the actual searches on the ground, the allocation
of police. FaceTime, money, resources. Massively.
There was a study done in 2020 by the Wyoming
Urban Indian Health Institute that looked specifically
at missing indigenous people. It found that media
outlets were far less likely to run a profile
of a missing indigenous person while the search
was still active. So they only get coverage after
they're found dead. Often, yes, which is obviously
too late. The entire point of the media coverage
is to generate tips to help find the person alive.
But this study found a detail that just floored
me. It found that the few articles that were
written about missing indigenous people were
significantly less likely to even include a photograph
of the missing person. Wait, how can you run
a missing person story without a photo? That
is the single most important piece of information.
Have you seen this person is the entire point.
It's malpractice. Or if there was a photo, it
was often a grainy, low quality image, sometimes
even a mugshot, which further criminalizes the
victim. Meanwhile, the missing white victim gets
the beautiful high resolution professional portrait
or the smiling graduation photo. You are actively
sabotaging the search effort by failing to humanize
the victim for the public. And then when no tips
come in, the police can say, well, there are
no leads. It becomes this tragic, self -fulfilling
prophecy of neglect. So let's try to wrap this
all up. We've covered a ton of ground here. We
started with Gwen Ifill giving this phenomenon
a name. We looked at the hard data that proves
the disparity is real. We broke down the psychology
of the damsel narrative. We saw it in action
with case studies from the U .S. and all around
the world. And now we see how it literally shapes
our laws and our police work. It's a powerful,
self -perpetuating system. It's not about one
bad producer making one bad call. It's a deep
-seated cultural habit. So what's the takeaway
for the person who's been listening to all this,
the person back on that couch where we started?
What do we do with this information? I think
the biggest thing is to become a more conscious,
more critical consumer of media. The news business,
at the end of the day, is a business. They're
chasing our eyeballs, our clicks, our attention.
We vote with our remote control or with our thumb
on the screen. We absolutely do. And if we, the
audience, only show interest in the serialized
drama of the missing white cheerleader, then
that's the only story they're ever going to tell.
We have to be aware of a couple of cognitive
biases that the research points to. One is the
availability heuristic. Can you give us the quick
definition of that? The availability heuristic
is our brain's tendency to judge how common something
is based on how easily we can think of an example
of it. So if you see stories about missing white
women on the news every single night. Your brain
concludes that missing white women must be the
most common and pressing crisis, even if the
objective data says that indigenous women or
black men are going missing at a much higher
rate. Your reality is shaped by what's readily
available in your memory, which is shaped by
the media. And the other one was mean world syndrome.
Yeah, that's the idea that heavy consumption
of media, particularly crime news, leads you
to believe the world is a much more dangerous
and frightened place than it actually is. But
specifically, it makes you believe it's more
dangerous for the people you see being victimized
on screen. It creates this misplaced sense of
fear and anxiety. So the final thought here is
that the next time you see that red breaking
news banner with a smiling face. You have to
stop for a second and ask yourself a question.
It's not why am I seeing this story? It's who
am I not seeing? Whose disappearance today didn't
merit a breaking news banner? Is the world really
most dangerous for the person on my screen? Or
is the media spotlight just stuck in one place,
reinforcing a hierarchy of human value that we
need to challenge? It's realizing that what we
see isn't the whole picture. It's a curated slice
of reality. And once you see that, you can't
unsee it. And recognizing that hierarchy is always
the first step to dismantling it. This was a
heavy one, but a really important one. Thank
you for taking this deep dive with us. Absolutely.
The key is to just keep questioning the narrative.
We'll see you next time.