University Auburn student Killed.. manhunt on (1 Viewer)

[CT Saints Fan]

Right. And the reason you did not hear about him was because he looked like this.

If he'd looked like that girl at Auburn, I guarantee it would have been all over the news.

That's what the 2 students who were killed at LSU looked like. And that was a huge national story. You can't take one incident and use that as your sample. There are too many variables.

I would guess that it made your local news. After that, what determines if the national media picks it up is affected by what else they are covering that day, etc.

Is there bias in media coverage? Absolutely. But you can't make generalizations and think they will apply to every case. There are probably even other young, pretty, white girls killed other places and they don't make the national news. Of course, that piece of information proves as much as when someone who isn't young, pretty, white, and female gets killed and it doesn't make the news. Nothing.

 

[Mr. Blue Sky]

That's what the 2 students who were killed at LSU looked like. And that was a huge national story.

Quoted for truth.

 

[keepoursaints]

That's what the 2 students who were killed at LSU looked like. And that was a huge national story. You can't take one incident and use that as your sample. There are too many variables.

I would guess that it made your local news. After that, what determines if the national media picks it up is affected by what else they are covering that day, etc.

Is there bias in media coverage? Absolutely. But you can't make generalizations and think they will apply to every case. There are probably even other young, pretty, white girls killed other places and they don't make the national news. Of course, that piece of information proves as much as when someone who isn't young, pretty, white, and female gets killed and it doesn't make the news.

lus-un2:

 

[TulsaSaint]

Oh, come the hell on? Am I the only one who notices that alerts on Fox or the other news networks about people who are kidnapped or murdered are overwhelmingly about blonde, pretty, white females? Do you really think that the rate at which they are covered even remotely approximates the rate at which they are kidnapped or murdered? The fact of the matter is that the percentage of kidnap or murder victims in this country who are blonde, pretty, white females is probably miniscule, yet the coverage they get is completely out of proportion. And my point was that it gets kind of old, and I wonder what that says about our society and media.

 

[keepoursaints]

I guess they didn't get the memo. :dunno:

http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/myfox/p...n=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=1.1.1

Found the link on Foxnews.com homepage.

 

[TulsaSaint]

Yes, correct. That's a local page. Let's see if we see Greta van Sustern (or however the hell it's spelled) gushing about it for an hour tonight, like she did with Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway and Dru Sjodin and that girl kidnapped from the carwash in Florida a couple of years ago. Let's see if attention focuses on it for as long as it's bound to focus on this girl from Auburn.

 

[keepoursaints]

It's on the foxnews.com homepage.. most of their articles have links back to the local websites.

 

[Saint Mike]

Yes, correct. That's a local page. Let's see if we see Greta van Sustern (or however the hell it's spelled) gushing about it for an hour tonight, like she did with Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway and Dru Sjodin and that girl kidnapped from the carwash in Florida a couple of years ago. Let's see if attention focuses on it for as long as it's bound to focus on this girl from Auburn.

National page:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335508,00.html

What is your point?

 

[TulsaSaint]

National page:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335508,00.html

What is your point?

So wait, when I provide an example of a college student who is not white or blonde or pretty and whose murder gets no national attention, I'm just using an isolated example, but when someone here finds one example of a black girl whose murder ends up on the Fox page, it suddenly proves the point that the media is absolutely fair in whose kidnappings and murders it covers. Right.

I'll ask it again. Am I the only person here who thinks the national media devotes a disproportionate amount of attention to pretty, blonde, white girls who go missing or get kidnapped? All of you have done anything you can to deflect attention from that central question, instead providing one example that will probably vanish in two hours from the front page of Fox News, while we're likely to be subjected to this Auburn story for days, weeks, or months, until they figure out who did it.

I've stated it repeatedly - the national media give disproportionate attention to the murders or kidnappings of white, blonde, pretty girls. That does not mean they never report any story about anyone else getting murdered. But the ones that dominate headlines, the ones that we see hour-long cables news shows devoted to - those are nearly always victims of the pretty, blonde, while female variety. Why is that central point so hard to get?

 

[Saint Mike]

So wait, when I provide an example of a college student who is not white or blonde or pretty and whose murder gets no national attention, I'm just using an isolated example, but when someone here finds one example of a black girl whose murder ends up on the Fox page, it suddenly proves the point that the media is absolutely fair in whose kidnappings and murders it covers. Right.

I'll ask it again. Am I the only person here who thinks the national media devotes a disproportionate amount of attention to pretty, blonde, white girls who go missing or get kidnapped? All of you have done anything you can to deflect attention from that central question, instead providing one example that will probably vanish in two hours from the front page of Fox News, while we're likely to be subjected to this Auburn story for days, weeks, or months, until they figure out who did it.

I've stated it repeatedly - the national media give disproportionate attention to the murders or kidnappings of white, blonde, pretty girls. That does not mean they never report any story about anyone else getting murdered. But the ones that dominate headlines, the ones that we see hour-long cables news shows devoted to - those are nearly always victims of the pretty, blonde, while female variety. Why is that central point so hard to get?

Aren't there more white people in the U.S. than non-white? This could explain the phenomenon of more coverage for white people.

 

[CT Saints Fan]

So wait, when I provide an example of a college student who is not white or blonde or pretty and whose murder gets no national attention, I'm just using an isolated example, but when someone here finds one example of a black girl whose murder ends up on the Fox page, it suddenly proves the point that the media is absolutely fair in whose kidnappings and murders it covers. Right.

Because you said it never happens. So 1 example proves that it does happen. Here is your first post.

Would this have made national news if she weren't a pretty white girl? I mean, stuff like this is pretty awful, but I do ask myself if it's really national news. People get murdered every day, but we only hear about it nationally when the person is young, pretty, white, and female. Because that's what the media assumes we'll all identify with, i.e, that could be my daughter, that could be my sister. It's plays on our culturally-embedded sympathy for women or anyone else we deem to be helpless or more vulnerable. It's the same reason child abductions are all over the news (when the child is white, of course).

If a black girl in the inner city goes missing, how often is it on the national news? If two little Hispanic kids vanish from the bus stop in El Paso, does Fox put it on their site? Of course not. Missing white kids and missing pretty white chicks are national news - other missing and murdered people aren't. So annoying.

And yet several quick links show that those are in fact news stories, even if you don't think so.

I'll ask it again. Am I the only person here who thinks the national media devotes a disproportionate amount of attention to pretty, blonde, white girls who go missing or get kidnapped? All of you have done anything you can to deflect attention from that central question, instead providing one example that will probably vanish in two hours from the front page of Fox News, while we're likely to be subjected to this Auburn story for days, weeks, or months, until they figure out who did it.

I've stated it repeatedly - the national media give disproportionate attention to the murders or kidnappings of white, blonde, pretty girls. That does not mean they never report any story about anyone else getting murdered. But the ones that dominate headlines, the ones that we see hour-long cables news shows devoted to - those are nearly always victims of the pretty, blonde, while female variety. Why is that central point so hard to get?

I don't know. Maybe they do. But you are studying to be a researcher. You know damn well that you need a lot more information to be able support your hypothesis that the national media gives disproportionate attention to crimes involving pretty, white, blonde females. You need to know the number of crimes against those victims. You need to know how many people in the population fit those criteria. You need to know how much time is devoted to coverage of those stories. Then you also need to know the number of crimes against victims who don't fit those criteria. You need to know how many people in the population don't fit those criteria. You need to know how much time is devoted to coverage of those stories. Etc., etc., etc.

And lastly, you need to remember that reporting news isn't like doing research. Their goal is not to be fair & equal. Their goal is to attract a sufficiently large number of the kind of viewers that advertisers want to pay to get their message in front of. What's the demand for news stories from their specific audience? That's all they care about.

Is it right? Is it fair? No. But who ever said news was right or fair. They are in business to sell airtime.

 

[TulsaSaint]

Aren't there more white people in the U.S. than non-white? This could explain the phenomenon of more coverage for white people.

Guess you didn't read my post. I said disproportionate, i.e., more than their percentage of the population.

 

[TulsaSaint]

And lastly, you need to remember that reporting news isn't like doing research. Their goal is not to be fair & equal. Their goal is to attract a sufficiently large number of the kind of viewers that advertisers want to pay to get their message in front of. What's the demand for news stories from their specific audience? That's all they care about.

Your point that the media obsesses about these stories so much because most of their audience likes to hear stories like that is well-taken. However, it's also worth remembering two other factors. First, the media is not completely divorced from the culture it reports news in. So we also need to consider whether their apparent over-reporting of crimes involving a certain type of victim is reflective of broader underlying cultural ideas about race and gender, cultural ideas to which members of the media are also subject. Second, it may make sense to also consider the extent to which the media helps perpetuate this demand in their audience. Even as the media participates in these cultural ideas about race and gender and about whose disappearance or murder is the most news-worthy, it also helps shape those ideas. That is, if they harp on one particular case, like that pretty, blonde, white girl who went missing in Aruba, then that may also be fueling a lot of the public interest in that case and others similar to it.

 

[TulsaSaint]

Oh, and to continue with my earlier point, I suggest you visit the Fox News site right about now. What's the headline? The Auburn girl, and the UNC student body president, who was killed "near campus." So that kind of disproves the earlier argument that the Auburn story was just considered newsworthy because it happened on campus. In addition, as you'll recall, this murder near the UNC campus happens less than two months after a murder near the Duke campus, in off campus apartments. But the Duke case gets no attention, when the student is male and Indian (and also not the student body president, which is probably important too). The UNC girl happens to be very attractive.

Meanwhile, the little black girl in Atlanta is nowhere to be found on the Fox News page right now, or if it is, it's buried in some corner I didn't look in.

 

[Det. Brees]

lets see. how many murders are there a year in this country... 10, 20, 30, 40 thousand.. you cant put them all on the news......why does it have to be about race...
if they only put black , indian or asian victims folks complain, if you dont put any folks complain.
we just had a levi call, its ga amber alert. the victims are black in that case.... its on the national news.

maybe your only noticing the white girls....
have we already fogotten the young black girl that was raped at duke......
come on give me a break........