NNPA columnist
Whether conscious or subconscious, the white-owned news media goes into a frenzy whenever there appears to be a white damsel in distress.
“Every few weeks, this stressed-out nation with more problems to worry about than hours in the day finds time to become obsessed with the saga – it’s always a ‘saga,’ never just a story – of a damsel in distress,” Eugene Robinson wrote recently in the Washington Post. “Natalee Holloway, the student who disappeared while on a class trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, is the latest in what seems to be an endless series.”
Robinson continued, “Holloway assumed the mantle from her predecessor, the Runaway Bride, who turned out not to have been in distress at all. Before the Runaway Bride, there were too many damsels to provide a full list, but surely you remember the damsel elite: Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Lori Hacking, Chandra Levy, JonBenet Ramsey. We even created a damsel amid the chaos of war in Iraq: Jessica Lynch.”
One would think that the only white women are reported missing. According to the 46,600 active missing adult cases tracked by the FBI, 53 percent of the victims are men and 29.1 percent are African Americans. But you’d never know it by the news coverage.
The news media’s obsession with white damsels in distress can be attributed, in part, to the complexion of the nation’s newsrooms. African Americans are 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed that blacks fill only 5.4 percent of U.S. newsrooms. In terms of African Americans with decision-making power, those numbers are even smaller.
The industry remains largely white while the country grows increasingly diverse. In 50 years, whites will become a minority in the United States for the first time. Instead of making sure newsrooms reflect that diversity, employment of people of color peaked in previous years, and today executives are merely paying lip service to the cause of diversity or redefining diversity so broadly that it will result in less emphasis on hiring African Americans. Compounding the problem is the trend of frustrated black journalists leaving the profession at a rate higher than their white counterparts.
Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media critic, acknowledged: “I’ve got to say, when you look at which missing-persons stories get covered (female, white, usually middle-class) and those that don’t, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that selective news judgment is at work.”
In an interview with Kurtz, Tom Rosentiel, director of the Project for Excellence, was even more direct:
“To be blunt, blond white chicks who go missing get covered and poor black, Hispanic or other people of color who go missing do not get covered.”