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Missing People Face Disparity in Media Coverage

 
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gozgals



Joined: 28 Jul 2005
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Location: A Place Called Vertigo

PostPosted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 3:06 pm    Post subject: Missing People Face Disparity in Media Coverage Reply with quote

http://lifestyle.msn.com/specialguides/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5289082&GT1=10323


What are your thoughts all? I know we have read these type of articles before but thought it was of interest.


<snip>
Missing People Face Disparity in Media Coverage

Sex sells, kidnapping sells, but not every kidnapping is equal’
By Michele Chan Santos; Special to MSN.com

If you are kidnapped or missing, it helps to be the right race, age, social class and gender. Otherwise, don't expect the media to cover your story.

"Sex sells, kidnapping sells, but not every kidnapping is equal," says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Kelly Bennett, a case manager for the National Center for Missing Adults, agrees. "Unless it's a pretty girl ages 20 to 35, the media exposure is just not there," she says. The most highly profiled missing persons cases in recent years have fit into this category: Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Jessie Marie Davis. All of these women were also white.

What about Stepha Henry, a 22-year-old black woman who disappeared while on vacation in Florida in May?

Her case has gotten some media attention, but her face and story haven't received the same relentless level of coverage as those of other missing young women.

"It's very disheartening because it sends a message that we are not valued as much as white citizens are," says Georgia Goslee, the attorney for Stepha's mother, Sylvia.

Also see: Faces of the missing from the National Center for Missing Adults online database

A Tale of Two Missing Women

Stepha Henry, who lives in New York, went with her sister to visit their aunt in Miami. On Monday, May 28, Henry told her aunt she was going to Club Peppers, a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale.

According to news reports, a man picked up Henry in a dark-colored four-door Acura Integra. Video taken at the club that night shows Henry there. But no one has seen her since. The car hasn't been located.

The man who drove Henry to the club says the car isn't his. Police think the car may hold clues to her disappearance. At 4:13 a.m. on May 29, someone checked the voice mail on her cell phone. Her MySpace page was last updated on May 24, five days before she was reported missing.

Henry is an honors graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York." She has a very bubbly personality," Goslee says." She is an aspiring attorney planning to take the LSAT. She's a beautiful young girl in the prime of her life."

Henry's case, however, has not been taken up by the media with the same fervor as that of Jessie Marie Davis — a 26-year-old pregnant white woman who disappeared from her Canton, Ohio, home in mid-June — about two weeks after Henry was reported missing. Media coverage of Davis' disappearance was nonstop. TV stations nationwide, as well as newspapers and magazines, followed the case closely. Thousands of people volunteered to search for her.

The disparity in exposure for the two cases is evident on the Web, too. A Live.com news search on Davis returns almost 20 times the results of a search on Henry.

There even seems to be a difference in reward money. The FBI offered $10,000 for information on Davis. Currently, there is a $6,000 reward for information to help find Henry, but that sum came from donations. Henry's family contributed $4,000; Crime Stoppers offered $1,000; and another $1,000 was donated by a family friend.

Davis' body was found June 23. Her boyfriend, former police officer Bobby Cutts Jr., 30, has been charged with her murder and the murder of her unborn child. But the media juggernaut didn't give up on her story: At a memorial service for her, news helicopters hovered overhead.
<snip>

Hit link for rest of story


CONTINUED: The Missing vs. Celebrities
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