As the case of Gaby Petito, who went missing after embarking on a cross-country road trip with her fiancé and was eventually found dead, received widespread media coverage, many observers brought up an issue of what is known as "missing white woman syndrome" describing how the media appears to favour white people when covering such stories - and ignores coloured people.
Although the massive drive surrounding the Petito story appeared to boost efforts to search for clues, particularly because social media was so largely involved, there are a lot more cases of missing people that could benefit from the same kind of attention, observers say.
“It’s kind of heart-wrenching, when we look at a white woman who goes missing and is able to get so much immediate attention,” Lynnette Grey Bull, a leading advocate for Wyoming’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, told NPR. “It should be the same if an African-American person goes missing, or a Hispanic person goes missing, a Native American — we should have the same type of equal efforts that are being made in these cases.”
Among those who recalled the term "missing white woman syndrome" was MSNBC host Joy Reid, who wondered why people of colour do not receive the same media attention.
This is not the first time the issue of such disparity in media coverage has been raised in the US. Back in 2014, Take Part magazine released a report highlighting possible race-related reasons for hundreds of thousands of missing Americans being ignored. According to research conducted in 2010 by Seong-Jae Min and John C Feaster, missing African-American children and women were significantly underrepresented in television news coverage. A study published in 2016 by Zach Sommers of Northwestern University also suggested it was likelier for white people to appear in news coverage as victims of a violent crime than people of colour.
The term "missing white woman syndrome" first appeared in 2004 when used by PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill at a journalistic conference.
However, researchers outline that it may not be directly connected to "overt racism", since diversity in newsrooms, demographics and the amount of online interest also affects media coverage of certain events.
“Journalism in general tends to be reactionary, and if we see something blowing up on one of these platforms, we’re going to jump all over it,” said Martin G Reynolds, an executive director of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, cited by The New York Times.
He also told The NYT that newsrooms are not reflecting the diversity of the country, and "until journalism corrects this, we are going to continue to be more and more irrelevant to the audiences that reflect the future."
The massive media attention that the Petito case garnered, however, prompted round-ups on the FBI missing people cases that are in need of fresh leads. In 2020, according to FBI data, more than 540,000 people went missing, including more than 340,000 juveniles.
USA Today reported that the FBI has conducted an internal audit of its field offices and came up with a list of 43 active missing person cases of people under the age of 21 that need fresh leads, with some of them remaining unresolved for decades.