If you’ve been following the news or been on social media in the last two months, you probably came across some sort of headline about missing 22-year-old New Yorker, Gabby Petito. She vanished after taking a cross-country road trip with her fiancé. Later, her body was found in Wyoming and the case was ruled a homicide, her fiancé still at large. This story blew up on all platforms, receiving 398 mentions from Fox News, 346 from CNN and 100 times on MSNBC in the seven-day period following her initial coverage. Why did this case receive so much press when there are many other missing person cases? Maybe it’s the intrigue of a “true crime” case that is now of interest in entertainment. Some, however, believe this is a matter of systemic bias in media coverage.
Journalists wait near the North Port, Fla., home of Gabby Petito’s fiance on Sept. 20. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
“If the woman who is missing looks like your own daughter or granddaughter, and you’re a newsroom executive, you’re going to gravitate more toward it,” Reid said. “If this is the way that these [other] young women look, maybe they’re not noticed as much. But we need to change that.” The MSNBC host Joy Reid criticized the coverage of this case noting that there is a misrepresentation of minorities in media positions. With a disproportionately white newsroom, inherently there will be bias toward cases in which you can relate to or as Reid states, “look like your own daughter or granddaughter”. Omékongo Dibinga, a professor at American University, argues that the issue is deeply rooted. “People just don’t see us in the same way that they see these White women and White girls,” he said in an interview. “We want the Petito family and everybody else to get justice, but we’re just saying that we want some of that [coverage], too, and we don’t get it.”According to a report released this year from Wyoming’s Taskforce on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, 710 Native American people were missing in the state between 2011 and 2020. “Media portrayal of missing persons differed between Indigenous people and White people,” the report concluded.
From left to right, Ahyla Grey Bull, Destiny Spoonhunter, Kiera Spoonhunter, Alea Sanchez, Alicia Sanchez, Annalilla Sanchez and Arianna Sanchez. Credit: Paulita Spoonhunter
Connecting with a theme from this course, Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story seemed to be a relevant parallel. There is a danger in presenting the single story. White women are portrayed as innocent and in need of protecting while other minority women aren’t covered in the media. This gives the impression that only white women go missing and it fails to recognize the hundreds of nonwhite females who go missing. There must be equal representation in news media teams in order to tell the full story.
References:
Barr, Jeremy. “Even within the Media, Some Question the Amount of Gabby Petito Coverage.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/09/23/gabby-petito-media-coverage-missing-white-black/.
Grant, Emily A., et al. “UW Research Finds That Indigenous People in the State Are Missing and Murdered at Disproportionate Rates, Media Coverage Lacking.” Wyoming Survey Analysis Center, https://wysac.uwyo.edu/wysac/projects/mmip-report/.
I think that is a very interesting topic because of how popular this news story truly became. The idea of systemic bias in media coverage is a very interesting to think about. It’s not a topic that many people think about or talk about, but in reality it is a very prevalent situation. The media tends to only cover very specific stories and leave out many other important ones. This definitely leads me to think of it being systemic because the whole media system partakes in this. There are so many other very important stories that should be talked about and just aren’t. I feel like this has a lot to do with popularity, the Gabby Petito case was very popular because she was a popular and well known women. There are many other missing people who do not receive the same treatment only because they do not have a big following. Overall, I think this was a very well though out topic and was written about very nicely.