quote: Does the name "Natalee Holloway" ring a bell?
If you follow the news media in the United States, particular the 24-hour cable stations, it certainly ought to. On the other hand, if you've been living in a cave for the past month or so, here are the highlights: Natalee Holloway is an 18 year-old girl from Alabama who vanished on May 30th from the island of Aruba, where she was vacationing with some of her classmates to celebrate their high school graduation. Based on the amount of coverage that this story has received from the national media (Fox News in particular), one must draw the conclusion that this is a Very Important Issue, and that all Americans should care very deeply and personally about it.
I must confess that I do not.
I find that I am inclined to agree with him, but I do wonder, though, why this situation exists? Is it the fault of 'the media', or is the media just responding to what sells? I can't imagine that the people at the news networks weren't keeping an eye on the ratings when they did coverage of Holloway, and so I have to believe that if more people didn't tune in when the networks covered Holloway, the networks wouldn't have shown so much of her story, and would have dropped the coverage. Even today, she's *still* being covered. Not more than a couple weeks a go, I wandered onto some show on msnbc with her mother on it pushing for a boycott of Aruba.
Of course, we might say that the networks created the buzz surrounding Holloway, that it is they that are, perhaps, racist in focusing on her, but I'm not sure if I really believe that the media is that powerful. Maybe it's because I watch so little of it, but I don't know that I buy it.
Then again, maybe the media is just a reflection of our racist society, and there's some kind of synergy going on.
All that said, what is the answer? Assuming the article is correct, and the news media is racist and sensasionalistic, it seems clear that they would change if viewers changed their viewing habits. So, write letters to the networks demanding that they be more representative of all segments of American society? That they show more things with 'substance', so to speak?
It seems to me that the response must be conditional on where the problem stems from. As we don't know where it stems from--media, society, or both--it's hard to say what the solution to the problem might be.
Thoughts?
(Note, there may be language in the link some people might object to.)
By the way, it's kind of interesting to see some of the e-mail that came in, in response to the article.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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The major tv new outlets focus on rating so in order to improve their rating they make almost everything sensationalist. That said there have always been news stories missed, and others that get over reported. Claiming that the news is racist based on one sample point just doesn't work.
More on how the new is made here. Note you may find objectionable things on boingboing. For instance they ran ads for suicidegirls for a while, nothing in the ads was worse than what you see on the cover of Maxim. However, I just don't wan to be accused of crapping in the Card's living room again.
Posts: 1458 | Registered: Feb 2001
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Yeah, I hate it when news networks get all hyped up about things I could care less about. Kids are kidnapped and go missing and are murdered and commit sucide every day, but I don't see the national networks covering it...
Posts: 879 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Media critics consider the following cases to be examples of MWWS:
* Kara Beth Borden (November 12, 2005) - 14 year old Pennsylvania girl * Taylor Behl (September 5, 2005) - 17 year old Virginia Commonwealth University freshman disappeared and was later found dead. Suspect currently in jail on unrelated charges. * Scout Taylor-Compton (August 25, 2005) - Found alive; at friend's house * Natalee Holloway (May 30, 2005) - active investigation * Shasta Groene (May 16, 2005) - found alive; kidnapper captured * Jennifer Wilbanks (April 30, 2005) - admitted running away. * Sarah Lunde (April 9, 2005) - found murdered; murderer convicted * Jessica Lunsford (February 23, 2005) - found murdered; murderer captured; prompted Jessica's law[3] * Lori Hacking (July 19, 2004) - found murdered; murderer convicted; prompted Lori's law proposal[4] * Brooke Wilberger (May 24, 2004) - still missing, presumed dead. man arrested for murder * Audrey Seiler (March 28, 2004) - confessed to faking own kidnapping in Madison, Wisconsin. * Carlie Brucia (February 1, 2004) - found murdered; suspect captured; prompted Carlie's Law proposal[5] * Dru Sjodin (November 22, 2003) - found murdered; suspect captured; prompted Dru's law[6] * Jessica Lynch (March 23, 2003) - found alive immediately, but rampant speculation about circumstances continued * Laci Peterson (December 23, 2002) - found murdered; murderer convicted; prompted Laci and Conner's law * Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman (August 4, 2002) - found murdered; murderer convicted * Samantha Runnion (July 15, 2002) - found murdered; murderer convicted; prompted Samantha's law proposal[7] * Elizabeth Smart (June 5, 2002) - found alive; kidnapper found incompetent to stand trial * Chandra Levy (May 1, 2001) - found murdered; cold case * Amy Lynn Bradley (March 24, 1998) - still missing, sighted in a Curaçao brothel * JonBenét Ramsey (December 26, 1996) - found murdered immediately, but rampant speculation about circumstances continued * Amber Hagerman (January 16, 1996) - found murdered; cold case; prompted establishment of AMBER Alert * Megan Kanka (July 29, 1994) - found murdered; murderer convicted; prompted Megan's Law * Polly Klaas (October 1, 1993) - found murdered; murderer convicted; prompted renewal of Three strikes law * Dail Dinwiddie (September 23, 1992) - still missing; cold case
posted
Does anyone find that many of the responses porporting to agree with the article miss the point pretty much entirely?
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mr_porteiro_head ... not to be facetious, but you actually are dying there. Every breath you take brings you one more closer to your last. Posts: 2827 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Yes, and if she didn't have an anglo-sounding name and appearance, that might be disconfirming. But it's not about the actual ethnicity. It's about perception and people's subconscious reactions. Lighter skinned black women get significantly more attention than darker skinned ones too, as do women with names like Donna over ones like Shaniqualilla. And we don't give a crap about men or boys unless they look like they've come right out of a 50s sit-com.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:First, most of what we call "news" today starts out as a press release, which then becomes a headline, a sound-bite, and eventually a story. In a parallel to the way government operates, in which special interest groups lobby to create or defeat legislation, most of our news stories come as a result of PR efforts paid for by special interest groups (businesses) who have a stake in what becomes "news."
Too much news is simply the repitition of an official source's press release. Some news (Remember the "news" released by the Dept. of Education supporting the No Child Left Behind Act that was essentially untagged advertising?)
I think that the cable news networks aren't doing themselves any favors by doing all their investigative reporting work on cases like this and not spending much time or effort independently reporting the situation in Iraq, for example. I think that in the next few years people are going to largely abandon cable and network news, just as newspaper readership is dramatically declining. People are abandoning these news sources for more independent publications--largely on the Internet--because it's the Internet that's giving them the real story, not the cable news guys or the newspaper editors.
Remember when tons of cable news viewers thought that we had found WMD in Iraq? That's why people will be abandoning those sources.
Missing White Woman Syndrome is another reason their credibility seems to be lacking.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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I would argue that the Laci Peterson thing did deserve some national attention, just not the breathless night and day coverage it recieved.
So It appears that there is far more than one sample point, however if there had been only one sample point my statement would have been valid.
Posts: 1458 | Registered: Feb 2001
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I remember it. Not very newsworthy, but when a young woman disappears, it's gripping.
Golberg, in Bias, makes the claim that news services prefer stories about whites, because most viewers are whites. I don't know.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Natalee Hollway's mother is keeping her daughter's case in the media and I don't blame her. If this were your child or your mother or sister, you would do whatever it took to find them or bring whoever hurt them to justice, wouldn't you? I would! I agree that only anglo women seem to get national news and that is sad, but it doesn't mean that they should get no news, especially if the girl or her abductor is still at large.
quote:Yeah, I hate it when news networks get all hyped up about things I could care less about.
This is a heartless thing to say! If this were someone you knew you would certainly care. The news should certainly cater to you and only carry the stories YOU care about. Posts: 1319 | Registered: Jul 2005
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MandyM: What makes Natalee Hollway anymore important than all the other people that go missing every day? The fact that the people that know her care and think that it is news worthy doesn't mean that any of the rest of us do.
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quote:Originally posted by luthe: I would argue that the Laci Peterson thing did deserve some national attention, just not the breathless night and day coverage it recieved.
You think the national coverage on the Peterson case was breathless. You should live here, where it was a local story. The only way to get away from it was to not watch any TV at all, not listen to any radio at all, and not read the newpaper at all. For months on end, all the way from the day she disappeared to the day her husband was covicted. And, while it was a local story, meaning in the broadcast region for the local TV stations, the crime was committed two counties away.
On the other hand, when Marcus Wesson, an African-American man, murdered nine members of his own family - children and grandchildren of mixed African-American/Hispanic ancestry - right here in town, the story got plenty of coverage, but not nearly the amount of coverage nor, after the initial crime, the emotional coverage that the Peterson case got. And, after the initial couple of days after the crime, the case got no national media at all that I know of, except for brief mentions on CNN when Wesson was convicted and then when he was sentenced.
I think a lot of the difference was the ethnic component, and a lot of the difference was that Laci and Scott Peterson were a young, attractive, upwardly mobile couple, while the Wessons were poor and neither the perpetrator nor his victims were especially photogenic.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I am not saying that Natalee or Laci or anyone is more important that someone else. I am saying that using the news to get the word out about a pending case could help find the victim or the perpetrators. Sorry if I didn't make that clear before. The sensationalism of some of these cases is excessive and is most certainly biased and that sucks but I do see the media as a tool to aid in solving abduction cases. And I thought that comment about not caring was pretty callous. I don't know them and I have not been in that situation but I do have compassion for what they are going through.
Posts: 1319 | Registered: Jul 2005
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The biggest wastes of national media attention I can think of were court cases against two black men: OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson. Of course, the bias towards the wealthy and famous probably trumps any racial bias (see additional example of the Menendez brothers).
I think the problem is societal rather than with the media. The business model at Fox, CNN and the rest is to provide content that attracts viewers. People made the choice to tune into Natallee Halloway; the nets didn't coerce them. The culpability is on the consumer (which is why I never watch network news at all; it's an abomination).
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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For all the people claiming that the Natalee story is a popular story with the mass of "viewers," did you watch it? Did you want them to devote that much coverage to it?
My theory is that it really wasn't as popular as they say.
WHO are the people who want to watch that story all the time? I don't know if the networks were fooled or what, but I just don't think those people exist in as large numbers as everyone seems to think.
In the end, the media creates the news, and some people watch it. for whatever reason, but I don't think it's always because that's what they want to watch.
Recently CNN had about 4 hours of coverage of a small plane that was stuck in the air, circling around Portland, because its landing gear was jammed. Nobody cared about anything but the conclusion (the plane landed safely), but the media treated it like real news for hours.
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