Who is Tamika Huston?

By Edward

Via Drum
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who is Tamika Huston? She's what's been dubbed a "Damsel in Distress" or DiD by MSM critics lately. A young attractive woman who's missing, and whose family is appealing to the media for help in finding her. Hilzoy pointed to this excellent satire on the phenomenon by the Poor Man (but that site is experiencing heavy traffic, so you might have trouble getting through).

Unlike the runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, or Natalee Holloway (missing in Aruba), though, Tamika, who's been missing over a year, did not get her beautiful face plastered all over the airwaves and tabloids. Compared to those other women, she's barely gotten any attention at all.

Here's a photo of Tamika:

Much is being made of the fact that the DiD phenomenon only occurs when the missing woman is white. News programming executives deny they take that into consideration

Cable news executives say they don't pick stories based on the race of the victims. "The stories that 'go national' all have a twist or an emotional aspect to them that make them interesting," said Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming at Fox News.

"When the Aruba story broke, I didn't know if she (Holloway) was white," said Mark Effron, vice president of news/daytime programming at MSNBC.

Others don't buy it though:

"Something is at work here, at a conscious or at least subconscious level, that leads them to choose victims of a certain type" to report about, said Eugene Robinson, syndicated columnist and associate editor at The Washington Post, who recently wrote about the issue.

"Sometimes we become advocates for their families," said Philip Lerman, co-executive producer of America's Most Wanted and a former editor at USA TODAY. "It's stunning sometimes how hard it is to get the national media interested when it's a minority."

Given the disparity, a generous person might conclude that perhaps it's simply a matter of numbers. Perhaps more white women go missing. Unfortunately, that's not what the statistics show:

[Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists] and others say the media mislead the public about "typical" victims. FBI statistics show that men are slightly more likely than women to be reported as missing, and that blacks make up a disproportionately large segment of the victims. As of May 1, there were 25,389 men in the FBI's database of active missing persons cases, and 22,200 cases of women. Blacks accounted for 13,860 cases, vs. 29,383 whites.

Criticism of this phenomenon is not new. About a year ago, MSNBC (one of the worst offenders of this, IMO) offered this:

“It’s all about sex,” said [Roy Peter] Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. Young white women give editors and television producers what they want.

“There are several common threads,” Clark said. “The victims that get the most coverage are female rather than male. They are white, in general, rather than young people of color. They are at least middle class, if not upper middle class.”

Such cases fit a convenient narrative pattern that storytellers have used for more than a century, a pattern whose design still incorporates remnants of an outmoded view of women and black people and their roles in society.

“In many, many cities going back 50, 75 years or more, journalists would refer to ‘good murders’ and ‘bad murders,’” Clark said, explaining how editors and reporters choose what police stories to cover.

“The example of a bad murder would be the murder of an African-American person from a poor neighborhood,” he said. “The definition of a good murder is a socialite killed by her jealous husband, the debutante murdered by her angry boyfriend.”

Obviously, it hardly becomes us that as a nation we're so overtly classist and racist. I imagine that a news executive who sees the ratings soar, though, must conclude that white DiDs are better for business, and, in the end, that's what he/she's paid to understand. In other words, I don't think blaming the media for this is the only way to discuss it. Surely, they could focus a bit more attention on the Tamika Huston story, even if it doesn't pay off right away. But if that doesn't change appetites I can't see what good beating up on them does. Their job remains the same. The best outcome of this, however, would be what Kevin Drum suggested:

Maybe eventually this kind of publicity will embarrass the cable folks into finding something else to fill their airtime. [emphasis mine]

Comments

[Slartibartfast]

Now that the racism layer has been peeled, who's going to complain about the inherent sexism? Don't men ever go missing?

[Edward]

Now that the racism layer has been peeled, who's going to complain about the inherent sexism?

The FBI stats cited above discuss the fact that MORE men than women go missing, so it is sexist as well as classist and racist.

[Edward]

Now that the racism layer has been peeled, who's going to complain about the inherent sexism?

The FBI stats cited above discuss the fact that MORE men than women go missing, so it is sexist as well as classist and racist.

[Anarch]

The FBI stats cited above discuss the fact that MORE men than women go missing, so it is sexist as well as classist and racist.

Guess we hit the trifecta, huh?

[Slartibartfast]

...and who's going to worry about the missing unattractive, I ask you?

Consider there to be a smiley-face somewhere in my first post, Edward. Good point, though.

[Edward]

...and who's going to worry about the missing unattractive, I ask you?

Only our mothers. ;-(

[Gary Farber]

I gotta say, I couldn't care less who this woman is, any more than I care about any of those other women I've either never heard of, or whose names I've seen mentioned as crime victims, which I've then gone on to, as is always the case with simple crimes that don't affect a larger issues, completely ignore.

Advocating more, but less racist, nonsense, is still advocating nonsense, and life is to short for me to care about fires, murders, car accidents, kidnappings, littering cases, jaywalkings, mass murders, or whatever hell else local tv and tabloids care about. Focusing on that crap hurts America. Stop hurting America.

[Phil]

Your empathy is whelming, Gary.

[wilfred]

I remember reading an article during the Laci craze. At approximately the same time a pregnant Latina woman was found dead off the coast of San Francisco and the national media was not interested. Never heard another word about her.

[Phil]

I mean, the capacity for caring about another human being in pain or need is sort of kind of what's supposed to spur people to, oh, I don't know, give money to a stranger over the Internet so he can continue eating, or posting his meandering thoughts to said Internet, or whatever.

Ah, well. If I ever run across one of those, since it doesn't affect larger issues, I'll ignore it. And urge others to ignore that sort of nonsense as well. Wouldn't want to encourage people to support nonsense. It hurts America.

[Edward_]

Who are you talking to Gary?

I advocated what Drum advocated...finding something else to fill the airtime with.

[Chris]

In the first hours, and perhaps days, the media exposure can aid in finding missing persons. After that, it's unlikely to help much (because we're unlikely to find them alive). For that reason, I think the media coverage of abductions is a good thing, as long as it doesn't continue for weeks on end. However, the fact that it can help (so much that police often try to get the media in on the act) makes it all the more imperative that we eliminate racism and sexism from the coverage.

[Jackmormon]

Gary, that's precisely the point, though. Attractive young white women seem to the networks to be more easily tied to more general problems.

Laci Peterson? A representative of pregnant victims of philandering husbands.

Chandra Levy? A representative of those innocent interns savaged by corrupt Washington insiders.

The cases--as are most cases of disappearance, abduction, or murder--are shocking in themselves, but because the parents are involved and have resources, because the victim resonates with the dominant culture's standards of beauty and worth squandered, the story gets play.

[liberal japonicus]

Certainly puts Michael Jackson's fascination with whitening in perspective.

(ducks)

[Elayne Riggs]

You know what I think it is? And this also ties into racist and sexist assumptions. I think there is a general feeling, on the part of both the media and viewers, that certain people are less capable of taking care of themselves than others, and the less-capable ones are the ones who draw the most "human interest" coverage - Terri Schiavo over non-PVS folks, fetuses over viable humans, missing white women over missing women of color... it all seems to fit that pattern. I do believe there's a perception at work that, perhaps because of the daily battles faced by women of color on both the sexism and racism front, that they're "inherently" more self-reliant than white women.

[tribalecho]

Chandra Levy? A representative of those innocent interns savaged by corrupt Washington insiders.

DEMOCRATIC Washington insiders was the point in that case I believe.

To there credit, The Today Show had Tamika's dad on yesterday.

ps. Great blog! Great writing Edward.

And please.......a bigger picture of the kitten must be made available!