PressEthic

After having trudged through Eric Alterman’s ‘What Liberal Media’ just a week ago, this article caught my attention immediately.

The only kind of bias in the media that was given some credence by Alterman in his book, was social bias. He admitted that the media tends to slant the news leftward in some cases, while reporting on social issues.

However, according to a recent research study done by Scripps Howard News Service, it not entirely true.

For a missing child to attract widespread publicity and improve the odds of being found, it helps if the child is white, wealthy, cute and under 12.

According to their findings, there is a great deal of disparity between the amount of white missing children being covered by the media, and the number of cases involving children of minorities.

White children accounted for 67 percent of AP's missing-children coverage and for 76 percent of CNN's. But they represented only 53 percent of the 37,665 cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children during the same period and only 54 percent of the cases found in a 2002 study of missing children sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department. Black children accounted for 17 percent of the AP stories, 13 percent of CNN's, 19 percent in the Justice Department's study and 23 percent of cases reported to the National Center. The discrepancies for Hispanic children were greater, accounting for just 11 percent of AP's reporting and 9 percent of CNN's stories, yet 18 percent of children reported to the National Center and 21 percent in the Justice Department study.

There are some explanations offered by experts, who claim that it not necessarily a case of bias, but just that of influence. Wealthy white families are better connected, and have the social contacts to get the media’s attention. And in most cases minorities do not have these kinds of connections, and therefore fail to interest the press in the plight of their missing child.

This doesn’t seem to be a plausible explanation at all—in fact it reflects even more poorly upon the media. Maybe, somebody should send copies of this study to Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter as Christmas presents, to be considered as material for their next few books.