It is not news that we continue to live in a white, male, and cishet dominated society, and the effects of this are not unheard of either. Something that has recently come to the attention of many people is the blatant racial bias in the media. This is particularly clear when looking at the media coverage of missing people and victims of violent crimes, and the differences in the reporting of them when a victim is a person of colour as opposed to when they are white.
Firstly, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was one of the most covered cases in the past few decades and the investigation has been given over £11 million since 2011. When contrasting the coverage of the McCann's case to that of Shukri Abdi, a 12-year-old Somali girl who was living in Manchester before she drowned due to the actions of her racist class bullies. There was little to no media coverage of Shukri's death, regardless of the tragic circumstances. It is obvious that racial bias played a part here.
Many have also linked this to a concept called the "missing white woman syndrome", which is where white people (women in particular) have their cases covered in the media far more than any other demographic. This issue is extremely clear when looking at the number of Native Americans and Latina women missing, without any state or federal investigation, in the US and minimal media coverage of their disappearance. Meanwhile white women have thousands of news stations covering their cases for months . There is no other way to explain this - it is blatant racism in the media, and it stems from the white supremacist nature of our societies.
Written by Kate Hopwood
Artwork by Isabel Johns
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