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.
The Missing vs. Celebrities
Meanwhile, Henry is still missing. And at one point, her case was overshadowed by celebrity news. A little more than a week after Henry disappeared, Miami Herald police reporter David Ovalle was scheduled to talk about the case on MSNBC-TV.
Ovalle says his interview was canceled because of breaking news about socialite Paris Hilton."I think the people I write about are important. I take my job seriously," he says. "I know people watch that stuff [celebrity news]. But you have a responsibility as a serious news-gathering organization, with all the things going on in the world, with all the tragedies there are; our priorities are a little skewed."
Jeremy Gaines, vice president of communications for MSNBC, explains why the June 8 interview was canceled: "Just like many days in the news business, we had breaking news on that particular day which forced us to cancel this segment. We covered the [Stepha Henry] story extensively on the following day."
Goslee remains thankful for any coverage of Henry. When asked about the cancellation, she says, "They made up for that." She and Stepha Henry's mother were later interviewed by MSNBC, she says.
Race, Social Class and Media Coverage
Why does Stepha Henry get less coverage than Jessie Davis?
"The answer is pure unconscious racism," says the Poynter Institute's Clark. "But it's not just race. It's also social class and gender."
And the difference in media attention does not go unnoticed.
"There is a huge disparity between black missing women and white missing women when it comes to coverage," Goslee says. "If Stepha could receive half the coverage of the other white girls who are missing, they might find her."
People of every race and age disappear. But missing minorities, men and the elderly simply don't generate as much media interest.
"We need the media's help in reporting all these missing people," says Kelly Bennett, the case manager for the National Center for Missing Adults. "We need media attention on all of the cases out there to solve the families' anguish. Families need that resolution."
Missing Men Ignored
Overall, more men seem to be reported missing than women, according to information gathered from the FBI's National Crime Information Center database.
For 2006, 173,903 missing persons records were entered for adults (21 and older) into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database; 99,736 were men, and 74,167 were women. However, FBI spokeswoman Connie Marsteller refused to draw conclusions from the data, saying because police departments and county sheriff's offices are not required to report missing adults, the information is not complete.
Why do the media — and their audiences — care less about missing men than women? Clark thinks it's because there's a public perception that men can take care of themselves (even though a lot of the missing men might have been victims of foul play).
If a missing person is white, female, young, attractive and has an upper-middle-class background, media coverage of her case will be far more thorough than coverage of missing men, minorities or the elderly, Clark says.
"This taps in to a sort of ancient fairy-tale mentality: the kidnapped princess, the damsel in distress."
The Missing No One Cares About
Still, not every young, white, pretty woman who goes missing gets the 24-hour cable-news treatment.
"It's as much about class as it is about race," says Ovalle, the Miami Herald reporter. "I have a stack of cases of missing white girls on my desk that nobody cares about" because they were doing drugs or working as prostitutes, he says.
Having a shady background takes a missing person off the media-coverage map because "it pulls them out from the underpinnings of class," Clark says. "Class is not just economic status but a set of behaviors. Someone who is courteous, who went to college" is someone viewers and readers can identify with.
Tragedy Parodied
Sensational stories of kidnapped white women are so prevalent they have been parodied.
A Wikipedia entry calls it Missing White Woman Syndrome or Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome. The Daily Show published the satirical "America: The Book," which contained a formula for receiving good coverage. This formula equates amount of media time with cuteness, skin color and the media savvy of the grieving parents. But for the families and friends of the missing, there is no humor to be found while searching for a loved one.
Hundreds of volunteers have turned out to help, but thus far there is no new information on Stepha Henry's whereabouts, Goslee says.
As the weeks pass, Sylvia Henry's emotional condition "is getting bad," Goslee says.
The sweeps of the water with sonar equipment and the searches using cadaver dogs have been grim tasks that, so far, have yielded no results.
Stepha Henry's family, Goslee says, "has to come to grips with what may be the unthinkable reality."
If you have information related to Henry's disappearance, call 1-800-CRIME-TV, the America's Most Wanted Hotline. You can also submit information online, at
amw.com | Report a Tip - Stepha Henry or at the Crime Stoppers site.
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