Establishment media have decided that the real issue with the homicide case of Gabby Petito is that the establishment media do not cover cases of missing nonwhite women.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid was the first to propagate this narrative, calling the media coverage of Petito’s disappearance “missing white woman syndrome.” Reid complained that many are “wondering why not the same media attention when people of color go missing.” That’s funny — I thought that she has a nationally televised show where she can talk about such cases. But that would distract from the real issues Reid needs to focus on, such as Republicans being evil racists (in case her audience didn’t get the message the first 100 times) or Nicki Minaj’s tweets about the COVID-19 vaccine.
Maybe Reid could even see a ratings resurgence by talking about missing women of color given that her show is now seeing its worst ratings since it went on air in July 2020.
Reid is not alone here. She was joined by CNN’s Chris Cuomo, another weeknight prime-time host, who asked if his Twitter followers would “take up the cause” of a missing Native American woman. Of course, Cuomo has been too busy using his show to propagandize on behalf of his former governor brother, to promote conspiracy theorist Rebekah Jones, and to interview felon Michael Avenatti (repeatedly) to have taken up “the cause” on his own show at any previous time.
CBS News said the Petito case is “shining a light on the hundreds of Indigenous people who went in the missing in the state and didn’t get the same attention,” apparently from outlets such as, well, CBS News. NPR said the “epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women” not being covered by media outlets such as NPR was frustrating. The Washington Post said that “families of color say their missing loved ones matter too.” Yes, they do. Perhaps the Washington Post could start covering those stories. It could even start giving full coverage to all of the violent crime in Washington, D.C., most of it against nonwhite victims.
Of course, there are reasons these outlets and media figures are complaining rather than just using their own time and resources to cover these cases. One is that Reid and Cuomo don’t want to waste too much of their time on missing person cases when their time could be used attacking Republicans instead. They are partisans, after all, not real journalists.
Another is what my colleague Tiana Lowe astutely noted: Most murder victims were murdered by someone of the same race as them. An increased media focus on victims of color would mean an increased focus on perpetrators of color. This is part of the reason why the truly immense surge in homicides, which disproportionately affects black victims, has been downplayed by the media as “hysteria” while a select few cases of police violence against black people are plastered across every broadcast and news website.
In practical terms, nothing is stopping CNN, MSNBC, NPR, CBS News, the Washington Post, and others from simply covering these cases. They simply don’t want to. It is better for their narrative of institutional and societal racism to simply ignore those cases and then complain when the case of a missing white social media star becomes a story.
But this is an indictment of them, the media — not their audiences and not America at large.
