MSNBC’s Randy Meier describes this missing lass as “a model.”
Just in case you thought cable news was bucking the trend of focusing on missing hot white girls.
The name of today’s media hero is Eugene Robinson, and as soon as we can figure out how to untie this damn Kaballah string we’re going to lay down our prayer mat and start reciting our daily affirmations in his favor.
You see, Eugene is tackling the issue no other media want to address: the obsession with the missing white-girl obsession.
Now that the bat is out of the cave (or whatever that expression wants to be) that media fawn over missing white girls – and that it’s only through the power of blogs that any missing person with skin pigment is getting attention – cable news and newspapers are chronicling just how outlandish their coverage has been.
On the other hand, fellow passengers on the Damsels bandwagon — CNN, MSNBC, and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast networks and the major newspapers — are so eager to display their high-minded earnestness that they’ve been running stories about “the phenomenon” of missing-white-woman coverage. They act as if said coverage were a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado, rather than a series of deliberate decisions made by executive producers and editors in chief.
Just let us know when this meta-meta coverage gets to be too much for you. At that point, we’ll offer up an analysis of the meta-meta coverage that’s sure to rock media trends.
All the missing cute white chics have been taking over our screens lately, at least when we’re not tuned in to Ellen or Oprah. Now the cable networks seem to finally be relaxing their unwritten policy of “pretty and pale, please” when it comes to covering the missing — but only because bloggers got on their case!
Now women (and men?!) with skin pigment are breaking through the glass ceiling and joining the growing trend of going missing on national TV.
Internet bloggers appear to have played a role in pushing Figueroa’s case into the spotlight. Starting last Friday, Philadelphia-area writers of Internet weblogs, or blogs, organized an e-mail campaign and coordinated their blogging efforts.
Their message to the TV networks: Give Figueroa’s story the same sort of attention networks have given to Natalee Holloway, a white teen from Alabama who disappeared May 30 in Aruba, and Laci Peterson, the white, pregnant Californian who was murdered by her husband in 2002.
Oh, and one more message to the TV networks: Your CNN “blog reporters” are, like, hot and stuff.