Racial bias affects media coverage of missing people. A new tool illustrates how
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
If you went missing, how much news coverage do you think you would get? The Columbia Journalism Review released a new database tool called Are You Pressworthy? It calculates the number of stories your disappearance would get based on certain factors like your age, race, gender and geographic location. The new tool shows us how racial bias continues to affect media coverage. NPR's Jonathan Franklin has the story.
JONATHAN FRANKLIN, BYLINE: Thousands of people are reported missing in the U.S. each year. And while not every missing person case will get huge media attention, the urge to locate them is always the main priority. But when it comes to missing person cases involving people of color, that same media attention is often nonexistent.
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GWEN IFILL: Why not the same media attention when people of color go missing? Well, the answer actually has a name - Missing White Woman Syndrome.
FRANKLIN: The phrase, coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, calls out the media's fascination with covering attractive, middle class-looking white women in comparison to missing persons of color.
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IFILL: I call it the Missing White Woman Syndrome.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Laughter).
IFILL: If there's a missing white woman, we are going to cover that every day.
FRANKLIN: This so-called media phenomenon never really sat right with Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.
KYLE POPE: Everybody talks about it occasionally. Everybody says, we got to do something about it. And nothing happened.
FRANKLIN: To start that conversation on how we should cover stories involving missing people, the Columbia Journalism Review launched a new tool that allows you to openly share your press value with the world if you were to go missing. The tool estimates that younger white women would get increasingly more news coverage than other racial groups such as Black, Latino and Indigenous people.
POPE: And 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.
FRANKLIN: It's no secret that missing person cases across the U.S. are becoming more common. More than 600,000 people go missing in the U.S. each year, and that's according to data from the National Crime Information Center. And research shows that in 2021 alone, at least 521,000 people were reported missing, with 40% of those cases being missing persons of color. But sadly, 38% of people who go missing in the U.S. are Black, which is double the U.S. Black population of about 14%.
NATALIE WILSON: I will say this. We are not naive to believe that every missing person's case will get national media coverage.
FRANKLIN: That's Natalie Wilson, the co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing awareness to the cases of missing persons of color. She says that the organization not only brings awareness to missing Black people, but goes above and beyond by helping families in the search for their missing loved one.
WILSON: What we're trying to do is to change that narrative, to show that our missing are - they're important, too.
FRANKLIN: Loved ones like the family of Daniel Robinson are also on that same mission, bringing awareness to Daniel's sudden disappearance nearly 18 months ago. Daniel's father, David, says that when it came to his son, a Black man, it was extremely difficult to get any sort of media attention about his disappearance.
DAVID ROBINSON: Media wasn't really at the time reaching back out, so I had to keep pressing and pressing, but it took a lot of hard work.
FRANKLIN: In the end, Wilson says that both media and everyday people have a responsibility to address this issue.
WILSON: We all have a responsibility to not only stand up for ourselves but to raise awareness about this issue. It's really a pandemic that's affecting our community.
FRANKLIN: Jonathan Franklin, NPR News.
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