To ask why the media seems so fixated on missing white women?

[TheGreyShark]

It feels like every time a woman goes missing, the amount of media coverage she gets depends heavily on her race. When a young, attractive white woman disappears, it’s headline news, with rolling updates, public concern and extensive investigations. Meanwhile, countless missing women of colour - many from vulnerable backgrounds - barely get a mention.

Of course, every missing person case is tragic but the disparity in coverage is glaring. Is it just about what gets views or is there a deeper bias at play?

AIBU to think the media has an obvious preference when it comes to whose stories get told?

Wikipedia shared the data from the US census data. Loads of places report the approx 61% figure for white Americans (including white Hispanics).

This is the source they pulled from:

www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/racial-and-ethnic-diversity-in-the-united-states-2010-and-2020-census.html

(I know people mock Wikipedia but they make it easy to check their sources.)

It hits over 70% when counting everybody who put “white” but that includes Hispanic and those who put white in addition to another racial option.

White alone not hispanic or latino is just under 60%
www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224

Do you think American school shootings or the Southport stabbing last year made the news in Iraq, Sudan or Myanmar?

Yes. The media is more likely to report on the disappearance of a black or Asian woman who has a professional role than one who hasn’t - possibly because readers and viewers are more likely to identify with them.

Less about race, more about attractiveness.

An attractive, professional middle class woman of any skin colour generates clicks.

''Twas ever thus.

I'd just like to add there are a lot of white working class boys that get coerced into county lines. No one cares about those boys either. There is a lot of issues with white working class boys being let down in this country but that's a seperate issue. I think there are racial issues and also class issues (no one cares when a prostitute is murdered)

In fairness, I remember the reporting of a bomb in a market in Iraq (many years ago) and the BBC reporting was that x number of westerners had been killed. It was weird - presumably many people had been killed but the reporting only focused on how many westerners had.

It’s absolutely stupid as a term and meaningless too as most crime is intraethnic. I was just giving it as a counter-example for when people claim the media never cares about crimes when the perpetrator and victim are the same ethnicity.

The fact is that it is more newsworthy.

The rarer something is, the more likely it is to be interesting to people, so the more likely it is to make the news.

"Homeless drug addict goes missing" isn't all that rare. "Doctor goes missing" is. Hence one makes the news and one doesn't, and why the news plays up the factors that make the case more unique.

You are not unreasonable at all. It's a problem the world over. For example missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in North America.

Why do American school shootings get reported in the UK?

I suspect this isn't the case. I may be wrong but I suspect most readers are not from middle class or professional backgrounds. However, I suspect people do find more educated and mobile people interesting. Similarly, people are probably more interested in hearing news about a celebrity as opposed to unknown person.

This was the case about a decade ago but it's supposed to be getting better.
Also I strongly suspect they know localities where sexually deviant men have escaped on probation and attacks are often same race.

School shootings are horrifying and therefore get reported. Most are in the US, although there have been some (like that terrible shooting on an island in Norway) elsewhere.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Middle class white women are considered ‘good women’ by the press, politicians, society. There is absolutely disparity. It’s shocking

Why was the horrific Peshawar school shooting in Pakistan that killed 250 boys reported in the UK?

Why are the horrific Nigerian school attacks and mass abductions reported in the UK?

Because they are inherently newsworthy events.

Also, the vast majority of American school shootings do not make the news in the UK any more - because they’re too common to be truly newsworthy. It’s only if there’s a significant number of fatalities that we hear about it.

When there was a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, and ten people were killed, do you think Pakistani news focused on the 9 American victims or the Pakistani exchange student who was killed alongside them?

Playing up the local angle is incredibly normal.

OP you want to watch Times Square Killer on Netflix - prostitutes in 70/80's weren't even considered human when their corpses turned up and sometimes not recorded. It is slow progress sadly.

The daily mail and the Sun love it because it almost always gives them a chance to show a pic of a woman in a bikini

It's a white british country, in other countries it will be different. People care more about people similiar to them so it garners more interest. Not saying I agree, that's just how it is.

There was relatively little interest in young student missing while running.i had to google to see what happened white girl

Actually they pretty much do.

This is a goady post because it's well known that there is a racial and gender bias when reporting missing people.

It’s not racism it’s biased reporting and happens to be true. Just like outcomes for black women during pregnancy and Labour are around 3x worse for mortality rates than for white women in this country. It’s not racist to be aware of these facts but there is an underlying bias whether you choose to believe it or not.

Judging by the Missing People Facebook page the overwhelming majority of people that go missing are white working-class men

Agree with this, that it is both racism and classism and sometimes both intersecting.

I think the classism angle is not solely that the media expects people to relate more to middle class victims, but more that a degree of shit is expected to happen to working class people. Perhaps that's at play with the racism too?

They're both horrible symptoms of an unfair society where inequality isn't just tolerated, it's woven into the very fabric of the system.

To add, I don't think white middle class victims should get less publicity, I think others should get the same.