I think some of the initial fascination with the case had to do with the whole mystery of it, and the truly weird circumstances surrounding Susan's disappearance. (Who takes their kids camping at midnight in their PJs?) And then it just got weirder from there, with the grandfather and such. People love strange tales more than a run-of-the-mill boilerplate story they've seen a million times. So the fact that the story has had an equally bizarre ending just puts the cherry on the wacky sundae.
I do think that, circumstances and details being equal, any story of domestic violence is going to get more media attention if the participants are white and middle class. The popular concept is that such things are just a matter of course in poor or PoC families, and thus they're not as salient. But since white, middle class people don't believe such things happen to them or people like them, when they do, they take notice. They start clamoring for more information on the story, start driving up viewership/readership for those stories, and the news outlets respond to the demand (which may be unethical, but makes business sense--you give the people what they want, whether they need it or not.) Badabing, media circus.
To be fair, however, I'm not sure it would be a better thing if poor/PoC families in such situations were given an equal spotlight. The tone of the coverage would have to be very delicate to avoid coming off like exploitation. The same people who wring their hands over a pretty white lady (this could be me!) gone missing would instead be viewing a similar story about someone else, with whom they do not identify, with the same kind of voyeuristic glee that makes people watch Jerry Springer. Such stories would serve not to highlight the plight of the people affected, but to give the relatively privileged a sense of superiority, cementing their opinion that such things never happen to people like them.
And therein lies the rub. The reality that white, middle class folk have the majority of the power to be able to make large-scale social changes stick means that any attempt at getting them to do so has to appeal to their sense of identification with someone who's suffering. The only other solution is the big-picture stuff of teaching kids, when they're young enough to form worldviews, how to have empathy for people who are different. This is tricky, of course, because it's too easy to default to "we're all the same," which is counter-productive. Training people to care about others with whom they may have next to nothing in common isn't easy.
I'm not sure there's another solution, though, outside of improving newsroom ethics to resist the cheap ratings ploys of these types of cases (regardless of who's involved in them.)
(FWIW, there's another lengthy rant in here about news defaulting to generating outrage without also giving people the tools to put that outrage to constructive use, but I won't bore you with it. ;) )
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-02-06 09:09 pm (UTC)I think some of the initial fascination with the case had to do with the whole mystery of it, and the truly weird circumstances surrounding Susan's disappearance. (Who takes their kids camping at midnight in their PJs?) And then it just got weirder from there, with the grandfather and such. People love strange tales more than a run-of-the-mill boilerplate story they've seen a million times. So the fact that the story has had an equally bizarre ending just puts the cherry on the wacky sundae.
I do think that, circumstances and details being equal, any story of domestic violence is going to get more media attention if the participants are white and middle class. The popular concept is that such things are just a matter of course in poor or PoC families, and thus they're not as salient. But since white, middle class people don't believe such things happen to them or people like them, when they do, they take notice. They start clamoring for more information on the story, start driving up viewership/readership for those stories, and the news outlets respond to the demand (which may be unethical, but makes business sense--you give the people what they want, whether they need it or not.) Badabing, media circus.
To be fair, however, I'm not sure it would be a better thing if poor/PoC families in such situations were given an equal spotlight. The tone of the coverage would have to be very delicate to avoid coming off like exploitation. The same people who wring their hands over a pretty white lady (this could be me!) gone missing would instead be viewing a similar story about someone else, with whom they do not identify, with the same kind of voyeuristic glee that makes people watch Jerry Springer. Such stories would serve not to highlight the plight of the people affected, but to give the relatively privileged a sense of superiority, cementing their opinion that such things never happen to people like them.
And therein lies the rub. The reality that white, middle class folk have the majority of the power to be able to make large-scale social changes stick means that any attempt at getting them to do so has to appeal to their sense of identification with someone who's suffering. The only other solution is the big-picture stuff of teaching kids, when they're young enough to form worldviews, how to have empathy for people who are different. This is tricky, of course, because it's too easy to default to "we're all the same," which is counter-productive. Training people to care about others with whom they may have next to nothing in common isn't easy.
I'm not sure there's another solution, though, outside of improving newsroom ethics to resist the cheap ratings ploys of these types of cases (regardless of who's involved in them.)
(FWIW, there's another lengthy rant in here about news defaulting to generating outrage without also giving people the tools to put that outrage to constructive use, but I won't bore you with it. ;) )