The American press seems to believe that the life of a prominent, rich, white child is more newsworthy than that of other children. Take the case of Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old Salt Lake City girl who was allegedly kidnapped at gunpoint from her bedroom in her family's $1 million house on June 5.
Elizabeth's face has since been on television, Web sites, newspapers and magazines nearly every day. When police released the picture of a man they wanted to question about Elizabeth's disappearance, the media plastered his face everywhere.
Although I cannot find fault with the Smarts for marshalling all the resources they can to find their daughter, I have serious problems with the way the media have reacted to the disappearance of one well-off white child. Day in and day out, 2,000 other children of all backgrounds vanish.
The vast majority of these disappearances don't even receive the equivalent of a raised eyebrow from the national press. This is wrong. One of those overlooked children is Alexis Patterson, a 7-year-old black girl who lives in a poor Milwaukee neighborhood and who disappeared on May 3. Alexis had vanished a month earlier than Elizabeth, but the tragic loss of Alexis didn't go national as a news story until some Milwaukee reporters and a few others began to compare coverage of her case to that of Elizabeth Smart's. At one point, a Nexis search of major newspapers and magazines showed 67 stories about Alexis. In a week, there were more than 400 stories about Elizabeth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found.
I firmly believe this disparity is due to race and socioeconomic background. Too many editors, reporters and news executives identify more closely with the Smarts than with the Patterson family. Like the Smarts, these media people often live in neighborhoods where bad things are not supposed to happen. When the murder or disappearance of a child occurs in those places, the lament is: "I thought it couldn't happen here."
The truth is there is no place where "it couldn't happen," but the presumption of safety-by-distance from the wrong neighborhoods is at the heart of much of our coverage of the perils faced by the young. School shootings, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, the rising rate of violence among children were all depicted as confined to ghettoes and barrios until events that absolutely could not be ignored happened in white middle-class areas. I've been in debates over the paucity of coverage of the murders and kidnappings of black and brown children.
Very few of my colleagues would even admit there was a disparity. Their reactions seemed to have more to do with their emotional baggage than their brains. It just seemed right to them to be really upset when white children, especially white girls, died or were missing, and that was it. Those stories could not be overdone. They didn't seem to feel the same way about the stories concerning other kids that we buried in the inside pages of newspapers and dropped after a day or two of coverage.
There is another difference between Elizabeth and Alexis. No one, as far as we know, in Elizabeth's family has a criminal record, but Alexis's stepfather, the last person known to have seen her on the day she disappeared, is an ex-convict who served time for drug dealing and a bank robbery.
This factor begs a new question: Are we now applying a standard of guilt or innocence by association to the news coverage of children? I have a sickening feeling when I see saturation coverage of some children's stories because I am reminded of how many other families are going through the torment of child disappearances without any hope of garnering that kind of attention. We know about Alexis only because her disappearance so nearly coincided with Elizabeth's.
How difficult it must be for Ayanna Bourgeois, Alexis's mother, to be reminded by every television screen, computer monitor and newspaper in the country that someone else's child is getting the kind of attention she must want so desperately for her own. The American divide between races and between socioeconomic classes is deep and wide. Unfortunately, it determines the amount of attention and help grieving families will get at the worst times in their lives.
Starita Smith is an award-winning writer and editor based in Denton, Texas, where she just graduated from the Master's program in English at the University of North Texas. She is a former reporter and editor at the Austin American-Statesman, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch and the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune.