Why do some missing people make headlines and others don’t?

[usernamechanged1]

I read an article in The Independent about women who have gone missing and (to my knowledge) have had very little media attention.

Independent article

With the ongoing case of Nicola Bulley in mind, why do you think that some people are headline news and others barely make a ripple?

This.

White and pretty = interesting. That's about it. You have to be both.

Yes - Shannon matthews

I also find this very upsetting. Ben Needham with a working class single mum didn’t attract nearly anywhere near the amount of attention or fundraising as Madeline and her middle class doctor parents.
It’s almost like the media seek to weave a story akin to a palatable murder mystery( I call it midsummer syndrome) and we must keep tuned in for the next instalment.

And yet, when my friend of the former description went missing there was no media coverage. She was found a few weeks later.

It’s true that being white and female raises the chances of high press coverage, but it’s far from the only aspect of the story. Being blonde makes a difference. Class - yes, sort of. Time of year is a factor. Setting, too.

In Nicola Bulley’s case, she’s a blonde mum going about ordinary daily life which ends in a mystery, and mysteries intrigue.

I don't know, and I don't think it's all down to class or race or age, because I know of several missing people who just sank without a ripple. They were fully functioning people with friends and families who loved them and they were white, middle class, and young at the time of their disappearance. One was a young mother of a toddler, who is also missing (in that case though I wonder if the family do in fact know where they are).

I definitely think missing men get less attention, and following a recent thread about missing people, I wonder if men are more likely to just walk away and start again somewhere else.

Think of the demographics of your average journalist, they're predominantly Caucasian and from well to do backgrounds.

Years ago I was on a course run by a former newspaper editor who made the observation that the two little girls from Soham wouldn't have had anything like the media coverage the story got if they hadn't been young, blonde, and so photogenic in that picture with the football shirts, or if it had been a different time of year.

And yet, when my friend of the former description went missing there was no media coverage. She was found a few weeks later.

Well it's not possible to display every single person who goes missing as it's in the tens of thousands, right? But as a general rule, what others have said is true. The high profile cases match the looks/race/class profile

Only one of the Soham girls was blonde. Sorry to be pedantic.

Missing girls (who are not teens) do usually get media coverage.

I guess this tells you what we know - that a white, young and female missing person will get the most attention. Horrendous though it is, I think you have to remember that as a news driver this can be as much salacious as evidence of concern - it taps into familiar true crime narrative that a certain audience is drawn in by, alongside relatability for a wider audience.

This sad story had lots of coverage from when he went missing.

From memory the Ben Needham case got a lot of attention.

I think the Madeleine M case is very different because social media existed and lots of people got very invested in debating it. Horrendous though this was for the family it kept the story alive. Not to say the parents’ better resources didn’t have an impact though.

to be fair there has been a huge amount of media attention over the years on Ben needham. As op says many of those people in the article have had no press attention at all. And people do go missing all the time with no attention at all.

1991 Ben Needham and 2007 Madeline Mcann is a huge difference in social media usage though as well.

The internet made an enormous difference to these two cases,

I’m not sure.

None of these cases in the links involve an abandoned phone actively connected to a call and the missing woman’s dog running loose agitated near to where they were last seen after they’d dropped their DC off at school and gone on a walk said dog.

I think if it was as clear cut as the police finding signs that Nicola fell in the water, a welly boot or a hat in there, it would have dropped out of the news pretty quickly. To be followed up a while later with a small article that her body had been found.

The vagaries of this case are what has kept peoples interest and concern as it didn’t make sense from the start.

Not sure if it would have mattered if she’d been black, white, asian, from a council estate or a mansion.

Definitely white/middle-class attract a lot more attention and deemed more press -worthy

But that aside I think the Nicola Bulley case is getting attention as it’s all just so.. baffling and nothing adds up, so people are particularly disturbed/intrigued/frustrated by it.

Agree with this. Is morbid curiosity that keeps people interested in the case. I’d wager most people are more interested in finding out the mystery than finding her.

The programme that was on last night had a criminal journalist on it and he said it’s to do with ethnicity, age and class.

The white women in the link you’ve posted may not be middle or upper class, or they may have pasts that aren’t as perfect.

It’s like Madeline McCann - every country in the world knows who she is and what happened to her, even though lots of children get kidnapped all of the time.

I do think the media has jumped on this case too because the public have got more interested in conspiracy theories and playing detective.

There are an increasing amount of programmes on Netflix where people can play detectives or have conspiracy theories and can have strong opinions on whether the suspected killer is innocent or not eg making a murderer.

I’d love to speak to someone working on this case and see if the public are making it much more difficult to solve the case.

This.

My local FB group, paper, and sometimes the police, post about missing people. They never make the national news because they are not an attractive white mum.

Ha. My mum said the other day you know someone’s family are under suspicion when they go on TV for an interview/press conference. I think race and class is definitely a factor but ultimately it’s hard to keep a missing person enquiry in the media. I resent everyone mentioning it with regards to Sarah Everard like her case was always going to be widely reported (as it happened sadly it would have been). Her family and friends specifically stated that they worked really hard to promote her case and bring it to the attention of the media. Granted I think they had some contacts, so that would have made raising the profile easier but it’s not like they didn’t have to work hard at it at first.

The media pick and choose the stories, but it's the dodgy ones that get really big. The ones that make you prick up your ears and think 'there's more to this than meets the eye.' If there's a hint of possibility that there's an undiscovered scandal to be found behind the scenes the media will blow it up and push hard on it. They'll be rooting through Nicola's partner's life I'm sure, looking for anything dodgy, hoping to find an affair or previous conviction or something. They're being kind to him now, but they never stay your friend for long.

most missing people are found mostly within a few days, it is not always a happy ending. Some that stay missing are missing presumed dead, others are missing as they wanted to go missing and may have rang police to say they are OK but they don't want to be found, in others cases a body is found
this case like the climber/ walker in Scotland seem to be people that have a mystery, there is nothing obvious if they had an accident drowned, fell off a mountain etc, people wonder why a body can't be found, if they wanted to disappear surely there must be some clue somewhere that this was their intention online etc,
you do wonder what police thing do they genuinely think she fell into river do they think it's suicide, they seem quite sure in public statements that no 3rd party or criminal activity is suspected but what they say publicly and what they privately know or think can be different things entirely

It's much more than race and class. Lots of white middle class women go missing. Its physical attractiveness that really counts. Nicola and Sarah E were very attractive.