Missing White Woman Syndrome: Media Bias And Missing People of Color
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
In 2022, about 34,000 people reported as actively missing were people of color. But people of color who disappear seldom get the same amount of media attention devoted to white people who go missing - especially white women and children.
The late journalist Gwen Ifill coined the phrase "Missing White Woman Syndrome" to describe the media's fascination with, and detailed coverage of, the cases of missing or endangered white women - compared to the seeming disinterest in covering the disappearances of people of color.
NPR's Juana Summers speaks with David Robinson II. His son, Daniel Robinson, has been missing for nearly two years. And Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, who has been helping him find answers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | No one has heard from missing 25 year old Jalani day and more than a week now. |
| 0:04.9 | And his family is still searching for answers. |
| 0:07.7 | Today marks six years since key shade Jacobs disappeared in Richmond. |
| 0:12.0 | She was just 21 years old at the time. |
| 0:14.3 | Today, these are just some of the people of color who have gone missing over the last few years. |
| 0:20.0 | Ashley Lauren, who also goes by Ashley Heavy Runner, was last seen in Browning on June 8, 2017. |
| 0:26.8 | The Bureau of Indian today marks three years since five year old Dulce Maria Alivez disappeared from a New Jersey park. |
| 0:33.1 | And tonight the question remains where is Dulce? |
| 0:37.1 | Today marks nine years since an eight year old girl went missing in DC. |
| 0:41.2 | The search for relisher Rudd hasn't stopped and today and some of them are still missing. |
| 0:47.4 | You might be hearing their names for the first time because their cases have not received as much national media coverage as |
| 0:54.4 | cases involving missing white women and children. |
| 0:57.8 | At the beginning, it was like a thousand other such cases, a stomach flippin phone call. |
| 1:03.3 | She's missing Lacey Peterson. |
| 1:06.8 | Down the night before Christmas, she was gone. |
| 1:10.0 | Please, please, please let her go. |
| 1:11.8 | Nearly two decades later, we have new developments in the Natalie Holloway case, the prime suspect and the 2005 disappearance of the 18 year old Alabama high school student |
| 1:21.2 | will now be extradited to the US. |
| 1:24.0 | The desperate search for Gabby Petito, the 22 year old who vanished on a cross country trip with her boyfriend. |
| 1:30.2 | Police now seems the nation is searching for Gabby Petito, but her boyfriend every year about 600,000 people are reported |
| 1:37.5 | missing in the United States. |
| 1:39.2 | That number comes from the national missing and unidentified persons database in 2022 alone. |
... |
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