I was browsing on Fox News’ website earlier today and noticed a story about a missing woman named Camille Cleverley. Apparently this woman, a 22-year-old white student from Brigham Young University, disappeared last Thursday with her bike and hasn’t been seen since.
Stories of missing pretty young white women are such a regular occurrence on Fox that it’s become a joke, which is exactly what these women’s families don’t want. It sounds cruel to call the disappearance of a young woman a joke. But after the umpteenth missing-pretty-little-white-girl news story, shouldn’t we really question whether these stories are worth extended attention from a national news organization?
I’m sure the people in Salt Lake City, Utah are very concerned about this young woman Camille Cleverley, and I have no doubt it’s worthy of close attention in the Salt Lake Tribune. But why would the national Fox news team focus on the disappearances of young, white women? Sure, it’s tragic. But the story about the 48-year-old guy who was killed crossing traffic in Des Moines is equally tragic. So is the story about the 13-year-old boy who contracted leukemia in Savannah, and the story about the 52-year-old woman who OD’d in Anaheim.
I decided to do a search on the Fox website for stories about missing women. I searched for “missing woman,” “missing girl,” “girl missing,” and a number of related searches. What I found shocked the hell out of me. I counted 28 separate stories on Fox about missing women — and that’s just from this summer alone, from June 2007 to today. And let’s not forget that each one of these disappearances generated multiple articles on FoxNews.com; Jessie Davis’s story alone accounted for 59 unique news stories, if the Fox search engine is to be believed.
For the record, here are all the women whose disappearances were deemed newsworthy enough to have an entire story devoted to them by the Fox organization in the past three months:
Paige Birgfeld, a 34-year-old white woman from Colorado- Camille Cleverley, a 22-year-old white senior at Brigham Young University
- Danielle Cramer, a 15-year-old white girl from Connecticut (found alive in her abductor’s house)
- Jessie Davis, a 27-year-old white woman from Ohio (found dead)
- Susan Fast, a 60-year-old white woman from Florida
- Cynthia Hankins, a 36-year-old black woman from Colorado
- Lorraine Hatzakorian, a 41-year-old white woman from New York (found dead)
- Stepha Henry, a 22-year-old black woman from Florida
- Amber LeAnn Hess, a 17-year-old white girl from Arizona
- Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old white woman from Atlanta
- Marilou Johnson, a 50-year-old Asian woman from Detriot (found dead)
- Cheryl Jones, a 43-year-old white woman from Arizona (found dead)
- Donna Jou, a 19-year-old white girl from California
- Jennifer Kesse, a 24-year-old white woman from Florida
- Hannah Klamecki, a 5-year-old white girl from Illinois (found alive)
- Kara Kopetsky, a 17-year-old white girl from Missouri
- Madeleine McCann, a 4-year-old white girl from London
- Alyssa Heberton Morimoto, a 24-year-old white woman from Colorado (found dead)
- Liza Murphy, a 42-year-old white woman from New Jersey
- Kelly Nolan, a 22-year-old white woman from Wisconsin (found dead)
- Theresa Parker, a 41-year-old white woman from Georgia
- Jon-Benet Ramsey, a 6-year-old white girl from Colorado (found dead)
- Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old white girl from Utah (found alive)
- Kelsey Smith, an 18-year-old white woman from Kansas
- Lisa Stebic, a 38-year-old white woman from Illinois
- Francine Tate, a 50-year-old white woman from Wisconsin
- Haleigh Whitton, a 11-year-old white girl in Alabama
- Kimberly Whitton, a 36-year-old white woman in Alabama (mother of Haleigh)
- Mahalia Xiong, a 21-year-old Asian woman from Wisconsin (found dead)
- an unnamed 2-year-old girl from Florida (found dead, race not identified)
Note that some of these deaths and disappearances happened quite a while ago, and yet they’re still making headlines. Do you realize that Jon-Benet Ramsey might very well be in her first week of college if she were alive right now?
For those keeping score, here’s the tally. You don’t have to be a statistical wizard to see the pattern here.
- 26 missing white women (20 of them under the age of 40)
- 2 missing Asian women
- 2 missing black women
Man, what are these namby-pamby liberal yahoos always complaining about? Looking at the statistics, black women are doing just fine in this country! It’s the white girls who are disappearing left and right, isn’t it? It’s practically an epidemic! We need to convene a governmental task force to get to the bottom of this!
The knee-jerk liberal response — that the folks who determine what’s news at Fox are racists — is equally unsupported by the facts. Many of these stories were simply picked up by Fox from the AP.
But it’s no accident that Fox is choosing to emphasize these particular missing-white-girl stories. Visit FoxNews.com on any particular day, and you’d be under the impression that white women are vanishing off our streets every minute in the United States. Just like if you visit Slashdot, you’d probably conclude that the whole of Western civilization is up in arms over Microsoft’s perceived manipulation of open standards votes at ISO. Watch the CBS Evening News, and you’ll be convinced that the AARP is the world’s most powerful lobbying organization.
So what’s happening here with the Fox missing white women stories?
It seems pretty obvious to me that Fox is simply pushing stories that will appeal to a large segment of its base. I don’t have the Nielsen statistics in front of me to back this up, but we all know that Fox viewers skew towards conservative white families in middle America. And what’s more gripping to a white families in middle America than the disappearance of an innocent-looking white child?
Of course, many of us long ago decided that Fox News doesn’t have the most, er, fair and balanced record when it comes to choosing which stories to highlight. The same is true of the Washington Post and the New York Times and just about any news organization you care to highlight.
So what’s my point? Well, I’m not sure I have a nice, tidy conclusion to all this. Perhaps I’ll just end this little rant by stating that what we call “the news” is rapidly devolving into crass emotional ploys for attracting eyeballs in order to grab a bigger piece of advertising revenue.
But then again, I’m sure you already knew that. You already knew that instances of missing white women are overreported in the media. I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to publish this. Barrel of fish, meet my friends Smith and Wesson.
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A few interesting sites I found while Googling this topic:
- A blog called Black and Missing But Not Forgotten
- An article from Essence magazine, Have You Seen Her?
- Wikipedia’s article on Missing white woman syndrome