Want to get on American TV? Judging from TV news programmes, you might think the easiest way is to disappear. With a clamour for ratings and hours of programming time to fill, people who have gone missing, preferably under cloudy and mysterious circumstances, provide for great drama and good visuals in a schedule otherwise dominated by drab studios and talking drones. But in fact, all disappearances are not created equal in American TV-land. To put it as baldly as possible, American cable and network TV news programmes like it when white women and girls go missing, the more attractive and middle-class the better.
At the end of June, the favourite missing person was an 18-year-old blonde teenager from Alabama, Natalee Holloway, who disappeared on the Caribbean island of Aruba during a chaperoned trip in May. Before her it was Jennifer Wilbanks, dubbed the “runaway bride”. Wilbanks disappeared from suburban Atlanta just before her wedding day, but gave herself up to police a few days later, blaming cold feet and expressing regret for all the police and emergency services resources used to track her down. In between, it helped that she blamed “a Hispanic man” for abducting her – an allegation that the media was quick to gobble up.
There are tons of these examples.
Critics often note that the same attention is not paid to blacks or other minorities who go missing. Says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism based in Washington DC: “To be blunt, [blonde] white chicks who go missing get covered by the media, and poor, black, Hispanic or other people of [colour] who go missing do not get covered.”
So what does this say about how American women are covered in the media? Certainly attractive female “victims” are not the only women on American TV, but they may be the most sympathetically covered non-celebrities. During last year’s presidential election a lot of the media attention about John Kerry’s candidacy focused on his wife’s money (fears that she had too much of it and was therefore not dependent on him) and her opinions (annoyance that she had them). It gets worse when a woman runs for office, particularly if that woman is Hillary Clinton, US Senator and wife of former President Bill Clinton. She’s been called “lesbian” and it was claimed that she has been raped by her husband. The attacks in rightwing media were both gendered: she was depicted as not dependent on men enough and also as a powerless woman (a victim of rape by Bill who had kept her mouth shut).
In their most recent Media Report to Women published early this year, the monitoring organisation Media Tenor reports that the rise of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to that post, and heightened visibility of other women in Congress and in President Bush’s cabinet, resulted in women appearing at the centre of political news coverage more frequently. “However, when it comes to business coverage, women are all but invisible.” The report points to the fact that in the Wall Street Journal, “the total share of coverage of female protagonists did not exceed 11% in the last 15 months.” The report did not analyse the ink spent on missing and murdered women, but I feel safe guessing that is one sphere where America’s women outstrip men handily.
Sean Jacobs is The Media’s correspondent in New York.