EVERY day, 30,000 or so children die across the world from easily preventable poverty. According to the National Victim Center, approximately 1,871 rapes occur everyday in the United States alone. While I could list countless other statistics of tragic occurrences across the world and country, none of them are garnering as much time (if any at all) compared to Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart or Natalee Holloway.
All of these women were abducted, but more curiously, all of them are white, relatively well-off women who received (and continue to receive) almost non-stop national and local press coverage.The most recent,Holloway, a graduating senior on a class trip to Aruba, has disappeared for more than a month; in this month, she has dominated the coverage of cable news, even in the absence of substantive progress on her case. An irresponsible media has blown the Holloway's case out of proportion, while surely heart wrenching and life changing for the involved family and friends .
First of all, the media coverage of Holloway and previous cases is creating a misperception about the true statistics behind abduction; this misperception is what psychologists label as an availability bias. In other words, based purely on watching the national media, one would conclude that the victim of a majority of kidnappings were middle-class, white women. In contrast, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of the 47,600 abduction cases, 53 percent were men, 61.7 percent were percent either white or Hispanic, 29.1 percent were black and the other 9 percent or so were Asian, Native American or unknown.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, put it clearly when he said, "To be blunt, blonde white chicks who go missing get covered and poor, black, Hispanic or other people of color who go missing do not get covered. You're more likely to get coverage if you're attractive than if you're not."
Other than putting minorities in an obvious disadvantage when their loved ones are abducted, this slanted media coverage is not accurate on a macro-level and thus creates an availability bias. Dori Maynard, president of the Robert Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, summed it up when saying, "In terms of giving citizens the information they need, I think we're failing because we're not giving an accurate portrayal of the world around them."
Even if there was no racism, ageism or discrimination based on attractiveness, the recalcitrant media coverage of one abduction causes resources available for all abductions to gravitate towards that one case. For example, CNN reported last Saturday that three F-16A Recce fighter jets armed with "infrared and sonar scanning" capacities will search for Holloway's body -- the operating cost of a single Recce ranges from $3,000-5,000 per hour. If one accepts a set cost of $3,000 per hour for each Recce, then one hour of operation in Aruba, which is not even in America's jurisdiction, will cost approximately $9,000. To put this number in perspective, $9,000 would be enough to buy 32,850 meals for starving children in Calcutta.
While no one disagrees that Holloway's family has suffered a terrible tragedy, one must wonder about the fairness of the special treatment they are receiving. According to the USA Today, "Across the country, more than 300,000 rapes and murders of women dating back 30 years remain unsolved." In 2001 alone, 89,000 women were raped and 3,200 were murdered in the United States; 56 percent of the rapes against women as well as 48 percent of all murders went unsolved. Nonetheless, a huge majority of these cases will never appreciate the treatment given to the media's favorites such as Holloway or Peterson.
Because the media has this power to focus attention and concern on certain issues, they have a responsibility to focus on the biggest issues such as genocide in Sudan, poverty around the world, the lack of healthcare for 45 million Americans, or a macro-level approach to unsolved crimes, rather than an overly-personalized coverage that creates the perception that individuals such as Holloway are the only ones suffering the tragedy of abduction (and possibly murder).
Sian Kian's is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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