Racial bias in the way American Blacks are portrayed on and in TV and print mainstream news media is not a new phenomenon in America. But the attentive, proactive, and positive way American TV and print mainstream news media have reported on an American Black story in the last 2 weeks, is a first and very new phenomenon that hopefully will become commonplace.
The late American Black PBS anchor Gwen Ifill coined the phrase, “Missing White Woman Syndrome”, to describe the mainstream media’s racial bias practice of covering missing or endangered American White women while almost ignoring missing or endangered American people of color. To determine how bad the racial bias is, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) sampled 3,600 articles from American TV, radio, newspaper, and online news organizations about missing people that appeared last year, between January and November of 2021. CJR then matched its data with age, gender, and race data tracked by the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).
What CJR’s research found was “if you’re young, white, female, and a resident of a big city, the coverage you’d receive if you went missing is vastly out of proportion” than the coverage a person of color would receive. CJR data revealed an American White young adult woman who is reported missing in New York could be covered in 67 news stories, but an American Latino male of the same age would appear in only 17. A middle-aged American Black man would be expected to receive four or fewer mentions in the press. An American Black man who went missing in St. Louis would only garner 12 news stories, while a young American White woman from the same town would attract ten times the media coverage.
To dramatize how prevalent racial bias is in covering missing or endangered American people of color compared to the coverage of American Whites, the CJR developed a tool called “Are You Press Worthy?”, it allows anyone to test their own newsworthiness to the media, should they go missing, by entering basic demographic data into the tool. Explaining why eliminating racial bias in reporting about American people of color either missing or endangered, Kyle Pope, the editor, and publisher of the CJR said “The implications of this are literally life and death, the amount of media coverage you get immediately after you go missing has a direct result on what happens to your case. If you go missing and the press devotes a lot of attention to it, you have a better chance of a decent outcome, whereas you don’t if they ignore it”.
Racial bias in reporting on missing or endangered people of color is not limited to the American news media. Ngozi Fulani, the chief executive of Britain’s Sistah Space says, “Race is the most important element in the UK when a woman or child is deemed to be missing or at risk. We know this because if the missing child was white, the amount of organized groups and media coverage that would be covering her disappearance would be a story in itself. We are not surprised. History has shown this to be the accepted norm”.
By asking 4 questions: age, gender, state or city residence, and race or ethnicity the How Much Press Are You Worth missing person calculator can determine how much media attention a person would receive if they were missing
Fulani cited an example, “A 13-year-old black girl, a child, has been missing for over a week, it receives the tiniest fraction of attention from very few media outlets. Contrast this with a white woman, sadly she too is missing, however, this is constantly covered in detail by every news outlet. This is the source of a cocktail of problems rooted in racism”.
According to the Black and Missing Foundation, 38% of people who go missing in the U.S. are Black, which is double the U.S. American Black population of 14%. Co-founder Natalie Wilson says, “We are not naive to believe that every missing person’s case will get national media attention, what we’re trying to do is change that narrative to show that our missing are important, too”. In that regard, a bright flash of light has appeared at the end of the American news media’s racial bias tunnel.
2 weeks ago 4 Americans Eric James Williams, Latavia McGee, Shaeed Woodard, and Zindell Brown crossed the U.S. border from Brownsville, Texas, to the border city of Matamoros, Mexico where McGee planned to undergo a tummy tuck cosmetic procedure. Shortly after the white minivan, they were traveling in crossed the border into Mexico, it was purposely hit by another vehicle and attacked by multiple rounds of gunfire; armed men in black with protective vests and rifles then kidnapped them by forcing them from the minivan and dragging them into a white pickup truck. What happened next illustrates how life-saving miracles can occur when the American media operates free of racial bias.
What happened next never happens when American Blacks are missing or endangered victims. What happened next was that America’s mainstream news media kicked in with minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day 24/7 extensive and informative coverage on the plight of 4 AMERICAN BLACKS, as if they were, dare I say it, 4 blond hair blue eyed Natalee Ann Holloway missing white women! There were no dog-whistle racial bias undertones of maybe the 4 did something wrong to provoke this, nor any negative questioning of what the 4 were doing in Mexico, among the news media’s coverage. It was just a 24/7 barrage of straight hey America 4 fellow Americans are in danger, action must be immediately taken to save their life, among the news media coverage.
The news media’s racially bias-free coverage of the 4 American Blacks was so immediate, so extensive, and so continuous that it proved the most important point that CJR and the Black and Missing Foundation make, which is the amount of media coverage a missing or endangered case gets immediately after going missing, has a direct result on what happens to their life. In this case of the 4 American Blacks, the immediate intense coverage of their plight saved the 2 lives that were not killed in the initial shooting to kidnap the 4, had the coverage not occurred the other 2 would have certainly been killed even after the drug cartel criminals discovered they had kidnapped the wrong people, in a self-serving attempt to cover up their murderous fiasco.
Instead, the racially bias-free media coverage was so immediate, so intense, and so strictly limited to the message that Americans have been shot, held somewhere against their will, and there must be consequences and action taken, that it created another historical first, shaming the Mexican shameless. The drug cartel criminals, who would kill their own mothers at the drop of a hat, were so intimidated by the immediate intense media coverage that they dared not to kill the 2 surviving Americans, and for the first time issued a public apology for doing to the 4 Americans, what they proudly and boldly do to others every day of the week.
But the bright flash of light at the end of the news media’s racial bias tunnel is not the reporting of this story, nor is it the 2 lives thankfully saved by the reporting of this story. The bright flash of light is that the intense reporting of this story happened without a single word, a single press conference, or a single protest demonstration by Al Sharpton, the NAACP, or the Black and Missing Foundation over the news media’s lack of attention to these 4 missing and endangered American Blacks. Their 24/7 barrage-worthy story evolved naturally even though 52% of American journalists have admitted that American newsrooms lack enough racial and ethnic diversity. But this instance of a naturally evolved story free of racial bias, in no way, means that the current demands and attempts to diversify America’s newsrooms should end. Because the future survival of American democracy depends on America’s newsrooms racially diversifying.
However, this story free of racial bias, which naturally evolved among the current white racially dominated newsrooms of America, does indicate progress towards reaching the ultimate goal that true racially diverse newsrooms will achieve; creating newsrooms in America that are staffed by red, yellow, black, and white Americans who report news based on the character and content of the news story’s facts, and not based on the race of the people the news story is about. Thereby enabling American society to take many, many steps toward creating the racially bias-free “Beloved Community” of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Great Dream.