It's good to see media covering media

Josh Mankiewicz of Dateline NBC just did a story on why the American media devotes so much airtime to missing white women, when they are only a fraction (albeit a large fraction) of Americans gone missing each year.

According to Mankiewicz's report: "No one is claiming that every missing-persons story should get a place on the news — there are almost 50,000 people in the FBI's database of missing persons cases. But consider this: most of those missing adults are men. Almost 30 percent of those abducted or kidnapped are black."

Obviously, these statistics aren't even close to representing the kinds of stories that appear every day on the evening news and cable news networks.

It isn't necessarily bad to be covering these stories. But I think that it begins to be harmful when cable news anchors go too far in speculation on the details of these cases and when these stories begin to overshadow many of the more important, and frankly, more interesting stories that are out there. My message to the media: It's a big world. Start covering it.

Steve Safran, editor of Lost Remote, has a post about his experiene in Aruba and his take on coverage of Natalee Holloway's disappearance. Link

MSNBC did another story about the same topic in late July:
Damsels in distress
If you’re missing, it helps to be young, white and female