[Crimson Dynamo]

Originally Posted by Jack_

The point was in my initial post and the links I provided, but in summary 'missing white girl/woman syndrome' refers to a tendency for the media to disproportionately report on cases in which white, middle class, often stereotypically 'attractive' women go missing, and devote hours of airtime and thousands of pages to these stories, meanwhile similar cases of men, working class and black (women) people or a combination of them go unreported.

There is much statistical evidence to back this up, and just as an example from the PDF article I linked, 'news treatments of child abductions in the USA show a particularly glaring bias in favour of cases featuring young white females: between 2000 and 2005, 76 per cent of child abductions featured on CNN News between 2000 and 2005 were white children, although only 53 per cent of abductees are white'.

Even without such evidence, just reading and watching the news will highlight this phenomenon. Tell me, in the last ten years, how many high profile stories do you remember of black women, men or working class people going missing that made national or international news? And if they did, I guarantee you there were open dialogues about those people's lifestyles, backgrounds, and how much of a role they or their family and friends played in their disappearance. That's because ~things like this don't happen to people like us~, case in point: the McCann's VS Shannon Matthews. Not too far away in time from each other, the former's parents overwhelmingly showered in sympathy by the press (yes the tide may have turned of late but the media still adores them), meanwhile Matthews' parents, town, home life were immediately brought into question - and why? Because she was unfortunate enough not to have been brought up by two middle class doctors. It is irrelevant how her case ended up, the immediate reporting by certain sections of the press was a stark difference from how Maddie's case was presented.

I don't know why I bothered to create this response because I'm sure someone will respond with 'bleeding heart loony liberal lefty scummy communist nonsense' but I'm afraid it's a real problem. Hopefully, if nothing else, it will make someone think.

The media just reflect the appetite of joe public, jack