In this particular case, 20-year-old Misrach Ewunetie was last seen on Oct. 20: I'm not trying to discredit this story but why is this NATIONAL news? Because she is attending Princeton?. You can share your questions and concerns with us through the NPR Contact page. Letters are edited for length and clarity. Here are a few quotes from the Public Editor's inbox that resonated with us. We also spotlight two stories: a narrative about one woman's scary experience seeking emergency medical treatment for a miscarriage in a state that implemented a restrictive abortion law, and a story of first graders learning about their emotions in the classroom using puppets. Read on to see what we learned and our recommendations. We look at how NPR decides which missing people to cover. And when Black Americans go missing they remain missing for four times longer than white Americans, according to the Black and Missing Foundation, the subject of an HBO documentary series.Īgainst this backdrop, this week we address an audience member's question about a recent NPR report on a missing college student. For instance, Black girls and women go missing at disproportionate rates. When marginalized people go missing, rather than sounding an alarm, journalists sometimes react with a lack of concern.īy selecting a misrepresentative group of stories to tell about missing people, the national media cumulatively distort systemic problems. On the other side of status are commonly held assumptions about race and class made by journalists. That status may come from wealth, a large number of Instagram followers, attending a prestigious college, or simply being young and beautiful. We are more interested in high status people. Recognizing this historic racial bias, some local and national news outlets have attempted to be more inclusive when determining which missing people to cover.īut that doesn't solve another problem: status. The truth is, it's very subjective and heavily dependent on local media, which in turn often relies on local law enforcement for initial coverage. Given how many people go missing every year (over 600,000 according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) and how few stories actually make national news, it's reasonable to question the criteria national newsrooms use for covering a missing person as a national story. (The tool predicts that young, white women will get exponentially more coverage than others.) Recently, the Columbia Journalism Review released a tool where users input their age, gender, location, race and ethnicity to estimate how many media stories they would garner should they go missing. National news outlets in the United States have a long history of devoting a disproportionate amount of resources to stories about young missing white women, while ignoring other missing persons cases as not newsworthy, and thus dismissing them. Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

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