Via Kevin Drum, here's Douglas MacKinnon on how cable news focuses on missing young, white women like the "runaway bride":
Note to the news media -- with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.
Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.
...The cable networks, which can certainly be considered centers of journalism, are also business centers with a harsh bottom line. The ratings for the cable networks are generally measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than the millions of viewers the major networks attract. Therefore, cable stations are constantly on the lookout for any story that may spike and then hold the ratings.
...I have a number of friends at the cable networks (or at least I did), and I have spoken to some about this very subject. While all professed disgust with the underreporting of missing minority women and young adults, most were very uneasy with the thought of shining a spotlight on their own management to ascertain an answer. "Besides," one of them told me, "you've already figured it out. We showcase missing, young, white, attractive women because our research shows we get more viewers. It's about beating the competition and ad dollars."
When in doubt on matters of media economics, turn to Jay Hamilton! In his book All the News That's Fit to Sell, he offers the economic concept that explains a similar phenomenon among the network newscasts -- marginal viewers:
When producers on those programs are making decisions about what stories to cover... it is the interests of younger viewers (particularly younger female viewers) that matter. Two economic concepts, advertiser value and marginal viewers, help explain this. Advertisers are often willing to pay more for viewers 18-34 or 35-49 for a variety of reasons. Their purchasing decisions may be more easily influenced, and they may be harder to reach since they watch television less often than older viewers. Since females 18-34 are particularly likely to make the purchasing decisions in their households, they are a highly valued demographic group by advertisers. This means that programmers will try to attract younger viewers to the network evening news...
Though viewers 18-34 make up 18.3% of the regular viewers of network evening television, they constitute 38.1% of the marginal viewers (i.e., those who report that they sometimes watch the programs). In the provision of news stories, programmers may often take the interests of the average viewer for granted since these (generally older) viewers are unlikely to go elsewhere. In models of product quality, it will often be the desires of the marginal consumers that producers pay attention to since those consumers are by definition making a close definition about consuming the product. This means that at the margin, network evening news producers will consider the interests of viewers 18-34 in determing what topics to cover in the news.
It's likely that the same thing is happening in cable news. Young women are the most attractive demographic group to offer to advertisers for the reasons that Hamilton explains above, and young white women are particularly valuable because their average income is significantly higher on average than that of non-whites. Unless the economics of the news business changes, it looks like we'll be seeing runaway bride stories for a long time to come.
(PS Make sure to read the full book for Hamilton's fascinating explanation of allegations of network news bias. He shows that the networks appear to directly respond to the interests of marginal viewers in making coverage decisions. In particular, their responsiveness to the interests of young women leads to more stories on issues such as gun control and education that may end up skewing liberal. And he also offers a fascinating economic explanation of the forces that drove the shift toward "objectivity" as the model for journalism.)
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