Isn't this screen cap of an actual dead child? Joann Bennet Ramsey or something similar? Isn't that a bit unfortunate?
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By its very nature, this trope is going to be about missing and/or dead women or children. The image was picked by community consensus a number of years ago, so if you'd like it changed, you'll have to bring up the concerns in the Image Pickin' forum.
I would like to make a few points about this trope.
1) the vast majority of abduction cases do not make the national news.
2) many do not make the local news for the first 24 hours in order to avoid spooking the abductor(s) the few I have seen in my area the amber alert goes out. The child is recover in 24 hours. No fuss no miss no media coverage until unless the parents want to give an interview afterwards. Too much media coverage and you risk panicking the abductor into killing the victim.
3) demagraghics in a mostly white neighborhood you are usually going to see white kidnap victims because that's who the victims are going to be. However in cities that tend to have a large minority population you're going to see more news stories about black and Hispanic girls getting kidnapped and fighting off kidnappers like where I live.
4) money parents who can pay or raise money for tips that lead to the safe return of their child are going to get more air time which is why you will see middle class and higher on the news media. Sadly people in who write fiction have written blacks out of the middle class even though they are heavily represented in the middle and upper class
Edited by NessaEllenesse
There is a huge uproar in most of my state, because they spotted a kidnapped child from Missouri was spotted a few miles from Nashville. My mom got a notification on her phone and a few minutes later they played a message on TV. That child is hispanic.
I'm white. I was kidnapped by my dad when I was 9. Nobody gave a SHIT, even though I was screaming and hollering for help as he dragged me to his truck. The only reason I ever got to see the light of day again is because mom begged and begged and begged. I normally don't get so upset over tropes, but this is just fucked up.
Edited by NeonyandereHD Hide / Show Replies
Sorry to hear that but... what does this have to do with anything?
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
It disproves the trope. This is a dead trope that only exists in fictional works and is driven by leftist writers trying to push a political agenda. That agenda is probably why no one gave a crack when this person got kidnapped.
Edited by NessaEllenesse
I added
- The term Missing White Woman Syndrome describes the fact that Western media will focus on the murder, kidnapping, or disappearance of Caucasian females—usually pretty and young—to the exclusion of minority, male, older, or disabled missing persons. If the missing white female is also from a good middle or upper-middle class family, this is somehow seen as more newsworthy: those from lower class or "underclass" families get at most perfunctory coverage. note
ROCEJ doesn't apply here: so I think I can cite the example of the dissappearance of Madeleine Mc Cann and the coverage this tragedy still gets several years on. The pretty daughter of two senior hospital doctors who ticked all the boxes for "pretty, young, very good family, professional parents". Being of the professional middle classes, the right skills and social contacts to keep the story in the press are pretty much given. Compare this to, say, Ben Needham, child of an unskilled single mother who lived on a council estate, who went missing on a Greek Island as a toddler. Ben who? Exactly.
IMO this trope is at least mildly offensive although I understand its point. Mostly this is because I know this guy (who was white) who had a sister that disappeared and was eventually found dead. It feels like it's saying "you're a white woman so you're unimportant and noone should care if you're murdered". I know it's in response to discrimination, but it... just feels squicky. I don't mind caring about everyone, but it seems like it's specifically telling us not to care about white women, which offends me.
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I don't believe that's what it's saying at all. It's saying we should care about missing persons of all races, and that non-white missing persons don't get enough attention.
I know my momentum exactly.
The page obviously isn't saying this or what it's being implied to say in the post below. All it's saying — and I can't imagine anyone trying to reasonably deny that this happens — is that American news media tends to give much more airtime to missing white women than to other demographics because the executives assume that "the average citizen" couldn't care less about what happens to said demographics.
It's a load of happy horseapples. First off, any time a non-white person goes missing, gets robbed, raped, or shot, the media is all over it.... along with people screaming this very same accusation into the TV cameras, note the irony if you can. Throw in an accusation from the victim or the prosecution against a WHITE person, and the fertilizer hits the windmill. RIOTS have been started when a black person accuses a white person of assaulting them... even when it was proven untrue. If there's any possible HINT that it might possibly be a crime by a white person against a minority, the media is right there, slavering all over it.
The ACTUAL least-reported category of rising crimes? Black on white hate crimes.
Second, if minority cases don't make it to the front page, it's generally because the victim lived in an area where announcing a crime was committed is like announcing the sun came up that morning. It'd be like having fire alarms in Hell.
^There are so many things wrong with the above statement, I don't even know where to start.
Edited by ElegantVamp You watch me, just watch me. I'm calling- I'm calling. And one day all will know...
Also, this conversation is almost four years old. It doesn't need to be added on.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Okay, this Trope is listed as "In-Universe Examples Only Please." However, the Newsmedia section seems to be basically functioning like the "Real Life" folder, and is loaded with exactly what administravia says shouldn't be there. I'm coming here before removing an entire folder, but I think the section should be permanently removed.
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Migth want to discuss that here
first.
Removed these:
- In a strange case of two competing versions of this trope the suicide of Phoebe Prince was covered very differently in the Irish and American media. In Ireland, every news piece put Prince's Irishness front and centre — she wasn't just a teenage girl who was bullied into taking her life, but an Irish teenage girl. Conversely in America, the Irish background was scarcely mentioned (and often omitted entirely), presumably to turn the suicide into more of an American tragedy.
- Prince being Irish was mentioned in the American press a lot. And they reported it as a terrible tragedy, which it was, without worrying about where she was born. So it sounds more like the media in Ireland was playing up the "She was one of ours!" angle to incite local emotions.
Since nearly every story I (someone who lives in the same area) saw on the subject for months mentioned that she was Irish, and it was mentioned repeatedly on news casts.
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The phenomenon of missing white woman/ girl definitely exists. Some people perceive this as a bias against the media coverage of missing and murdered men & women of ethnic minorities, however is this really the case??? You could ask yourself the question WHY does the media choose to cover the disappearance of "pretty, missing, white women" more than other groups? Is it REALLY down to bias???
As a feminist and academic in Crminology and Law, I have studied various critiques and studies on this issue. The main factor is that the press will do whatever is in their best interests to sell newspapers however we as the public and the consumers, are the hand that feeds them. Now, WHY do we as consumers, want to know more about missing and murdered white women than any other group???
Look at newspaper and television coverage of murdered men vs murdered women. The difference I have observed quite remarkedly is that in cases where men have disappeared and are later found murdered, in the MAJORITY of cases, the media's tone is very austere. Unless it is a VERY unusual case, the media does not delve into the circumstances of his death, ie. his private/ sexual life, whether he was tortured, maimed etc. However, even if these details are discovered, the media does not focus too much on it, mentions it fleetingly, then shifts focus back onto the killer/ suspect and his unusual behaviour.
Now, compare this to the murder of white women. Time after time, we are told she was raped beforehand. The media drive is almost primarily focused on this. We learn every detail of her last hours, how she was taped, bound, gagged, tortured etc. The same amount of public and media interest is not observed in male and other ethnic women murder cases. Why is this??? The details of her last hours are told in glorifyingly shocking detail which the media almost appears to relish in, whilst also condemning the killer in some way. Men who kill women are given notorious nicknames, ie. "The Suffolk Strangler". In short, whether we condemn them or not, they are quite simply GLORIFIED.
The media is powered by predominantly middle class, white men and as well as serving the interests of the public, they are also serving their own. There is a damsel in distress theme here, however the degree to which they revel in telling these innate details is incredible. A murdered man is given respect in this sense whereas the media and even the public to a degree, conveniently forget that there was once a personality behind the murdered white woman. Is it possible that sex, or stories of it, sells even in death????
"It's nasty because it implies that other missing persons are lesser victims or even not victims at all" <- No it doesn't! Gahhhh! It's bad enough that there are racists on this planet, but these so-called anti-racists or anti-sexist with their weird and offensive conclusions only seem to be just as bad. I also notice that the most mentioned missing persons unmentioned mentioned in tvtropes are young attractive coloured women while most missing people are men and probably not attractive men either.
I think it implies either the stories or the pictures of the girls sell better, that's also why most complaints here are for not including other hot girls. Not because hot black chicks ugly men are lesser victims.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: A truckload of natter, possible real life sectionomy?
, started by PacificMackerel on Feb 11th 2012 at 11:49:31 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman