Racial bias affects media coverage of missing people. A new tool illustrates how
The database tool estimates that younger, white women will get increasingly more news coverage than other racial groups — such as Black, Latino and Indigenous people.
Thousands of people are reported missing in the United States each year. And while not every missing person case will get widespread media coverage, the fight to locate them — whether alive or dead — is always the main priority.
However, when it comes to missing person cases involving people of color, that same media attention quickly dissolves, ultimately feeding into the phenomenon of 'Missing White Woman Syndrome' — a phrase coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill that addresses the media's fascination with covering attractive, middle class-looking white women in comparison to missing persons of color.
This so-called media phenomenon never sat right with Kyle Pope,
