Yesterday, I did a Twitter thread about "Missing White Woman Syndrome," the idea that media give more coverage to missing white women over other groups

I also invited readers to name others outside the demographic who they thought received nat'l coverage. Here's the follow-up…
First, here is the the thread, in case you missed it.

I must've triggered a lot of far-right Republicans with it.

Most sent brainless emotional responses, others sent me names of people. So I looked them up in Google searches of Fox and CNN's sites
Altogether, I received 46 different names of people that respondents believed had received national coverage. Overwhelmingly, as you'll see, the missing people did not receive much, if any coverage.
Altogether, the 46 individuals suggested to me received 3,826 hits on Google on the websites of Fox News and CNN.

By contrast, just one white woman, Natalee Holloway, who went missing in 2005 received 5,200 results. Gabby Petito had 111,300.
Overwhelmingly, the white Trump supporters who responded angrily did not supply any data to support their conclusions that I was wrong, even though I cited multiple sources.

Instead, like MAGA types often do, they tried to use anecdotes, which as we see today, were wrong.
I said this yesterday but will repeat it again here: Anyone whose loved one goes missing has every right to advocate for them as much as they can.

But national media outlets have a responsibility to make sure that they help people, not just ones they think would get good ratings
According to the FBI's National Crime Information Center, there are over 89,000 missing person cases. 45% of them are people who are not white. Clearly, that is not how the media outlets are dispensing coverage.

fbi.gov/file-repositor…
Other critics claimed that the reason these specific white women or girls got lots of coverage was because they were conventionally attractive or had interesting stories.

But that's really not correct either.
I'm not going to comment on anyone's appearance, but one person by the "interesting" criterion who should have received a ton of coverage was Aniah Blanchard, the stepdaughter of UFC star Walt Harris.

She received 11 stories between CNN and Fox. cnn.com/2019/12/02/us/…
I'm sympathetic to the argument that missing persons stories are better suited to specialized media and local media because the national press barely does any in-depth coverage of the many extremists at the top levels of U.S. politics or about actual policies each party wants.
Producers & editors, if you are going to cover missing persons stories, be fair in how you do it. Maybe choose who to cover randomly rather than how thin, white, and attractive you think the victim is.

Covering missing people should be about helping rather than voyeurism. /end
PS: Here is a link to download my spreadsheet, if you would like to.

I believe in releasing data and methods for full transparency in reporting. 1drv.ms/x/s!AmfAX2pz10…

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More from @mattsheffield

21 Sep
1/n: White Republicans are so totally coddled from reality that most have never heard the term "Missing White Woman Syndrome" even as they have devoured endless Fox coverage of victims like Gabby Petito, Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway.

But it's absolutely real.
If you're white, think about it in your own experience first. Can you name a single person who was reported missing that was not a white woman? I'm guessing most of you cannot. Non-white women and men of any race don't get this saturation level of coverage on cable and elsewhere.
There have been multiple studies of media coverage that show Missing White Woman Syndrome is real.

Here's one that found missing black women were much less likely to be covered scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten…
Read 9 tweets
15 Sep
Now that the #CARecall has collapsed and Larry Elder has lost overwhelmingly, let's talk about the history and future of CA Republicans (1/n)
First thing to remember is that like all Western states, California was historically Republican. This was true all the way through most of the 20th century. The only two presidents from CA were GOP, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
The future looks bleak for CA Republicans but it has been visible for decades, beginning in the 1990s when the state GOP ran ad campaigns trying to hit typical right wing fear campaigns of religion and immigration. They backfired though and actually drove voters away.
Read 12 tweets
14 Sep
Thread: Texas abortion vigilantism & Jim Crow

By now, ppl know that the TX abortion law was constructed to avoid lawsuit enforcement. But there's more to the story.

The law's tactics are the exact same that TX used a century ago under Jim Crow flux.community/stefanie-lindq…
The Texas abortion law bans enforcement by “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state.”

This is how black Texans were deprived of their right to vote a century ago.
Because of the 14th Amendment, Texas could not explicitly ban former slaves from voting. What it did instead in 1923 was to ban them from voting in party primaries. This was struck down by SCOTUS in 1927 in Nixon v. Herndon.
Read 8 tweets
9 Sep
This was an essential thing to say. Republican voters don't realize that their elites are vaccinated but have been lying to them in order to monetize ignorance.
If I had to guess, I would say that the reason Biden said "even Fox News" is because of a new Democratic strategy memo that shows how Americans are sick of GOP covid obstructionism. More from @ThePlumLineGS here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
This is a strategy that has never been tried by Democrats before, telling Republican voters the truth: Their party manipulates to them constantly.

It is a strategy that actually has been proven by someone--Donald Trump. His entire 2016 primary campaign was based on it.
Read 8 tweets
9 Sep
Thread: Who is funding the #CARecall effort to get rid of Gavin Newsom? Luxury real estate developers, radical Christian supremacists, and hedge fund fat cats.

Please join me down the rabbit hole and share, if you wouldn't mind.
The biggest donor to the #CaliforniaRecallElection effort against Newsom is Geoff Palmer. He's a luxury condo developer who hates Newsom's plans to make more affordable housing in CA.

Palmer has donated $1.2 million ladowntownnews.com/news/geoff-pal…
Next on the list is John Kruger. He's a big donor to right-wing Christian schools focused on getting them government cash.

He originally tried to hide the $500,000 he donated to the recall effort behind a corporation named after a Bible verse, Proverbs 3:9. ...
Read 16 tweets
3 Sep
Thread: How the California recall scheme is part of a broader conservative effort to make democracy obsolete.

This is a summary of my latest for @DiscoverFlux: flux.community/matthew-sheffi…
A lot of people think that the effort by California Republicans to recall Gavin Newsom is just a ridiculous joke. It's anything but.

In fact, it's part of a decades-long conservative tradition of using legal trickery to shape the electorate so that they can with w/a minority.
This idea was stated explicitly in 1980 by Paul Weyrich, a Christian nationalist activist who started the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the predecessor to the Christian Coalition.
Read 11 tweets

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