As one of America's new breed of media critics, Philadelphia blogger Richard Blair watched for weeks as the media devoted intense coverage to the story of the May 30 disappearance of Natalee Holloway while on a high school graduation trip to Aruba.
Then, on July 18, another young woman went missing, this one in his hometown. Photos of LaToyia Figueroa, 24, show the kind of smiling, attractive young woman whose disappearance has become a staple of television news coverage, particularly cable news, in recent years.
Except for one thing, a growing chorus of critics say: Figueroa, five months pregnant and the mother of a 7-year-old, comes from a lower-income black family, while the missing women regularly portrayed on television are overwhelmingly white. Her frustrated family had resorted to picketing on a busy street corner to draw attention to her disappearance when Blair and other Philadelphia bloggers took up Figueroa's case.
"Certainly Natalee Holloway's story is tragic in its own right," Blair said. "But what makes it more newsworthy than a five-month pregnant mother?"
"I think this is part of a larger discussion: Who's news, who's newsworthy, and who's making these decisions," Blair said. "I think race is a factor, as well as economic status."
Criticism of the media disparity has increased with the growth of the news genre focusing on missing women. While the media seem to focus on a parade of attractive disappeared white women -- from Laci Peterson and Chandra Levy to "runaway bride" Jennifer Wilbanks, the scores of missing black and Latina women garner little or no national attention, critics say.
The decapitated body of Evelyn Hernandez, 24, who was nine months pregnant, was discovered in the San Francisco Bay a few months before Peterson, but she did not touch off a firestorm of coverage. Nor did the disappearance of Ardena Carter, 23, a pregnant black graduate student who was last seen alive on her way to the library in Georgia in 2003. The remains of Carter and her unborn child turned up in the woods two months later.
"I don't think a media director is sitting around saying, 'Hey, there's this black woman in Philadelphia and she disappeared and we don't care,' " said Todd Boyd, USC professor of critical studies. "It's an unconscious decision about who matters and who doesn't.
"In general, there is an assumption that crime is such a part of black and Latino culture, that these things happen all the time," Boyd said. "In many people's minds it's regarded as being commonplace and not that big a deal."
