BLOG post #1

My Journey to Getting Approved

discovering a story: My project Inspiration

I was initially inclined to pursue my topic of Missing White Women syndrome after the mass media scare for Gabby Petito. Media coverage surrounding Gabby Petito was everywhere. This led me to question what the media's motive for centralizing coverage on a single race and gender was.

My journey started on a mission to seek out the unknowns of media coverage and challenge the injustices being ignored by society.

Telling their story: What is missing white woman syndrome?

Missing white woman syndrome is a term used by media commentators to refer to the excessive media coverage of missing persons cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls compared to the alleged relative lack of attention towards missing women who are not white, women of lower social classes, and missing men or boys.

Emily Burns in her podcast (linked to the right) attributes Petito's fame to the ability to relate to a "white woman" and hear about something other than COVID.

Podcast link:

Podcast hosts explain “missing white woman syndrome” criticismsThere are thousands of missing persons cases that receive hardly any of the interest or media attention of this case — many of them involving people of color.

crafting the narrative: underlying bias

However, there was more to the story than just a story other than COVID. There was a clear case of misrepresentation of women of color that disappeared in similar situations as previously explored by Alia Shoaib. He argues that there have been similar occurrences that resemble the Gabby Petito case, that were simply not reported on when the victim was a woman of color. Therefore, Shoaib states that this missing white woman syndrome is the idea of the media and society in general, favoring the coverage of missing white women over women of color.

making headlines: Getting Approved

After investigating the Colorado Missing Person's Report, I centered my project around the biases within the media coverage, with an emphasis on the comparison of white woman to women of color. For my project, I have created a scale for the varying amounts of media coverage of women in Colorado in the last five years.

My research project was recently approved, and I plan to start my research early January of 2022. The story of thousands of underrepresented women will finally be told through my research.

Please check back in a couple weeks to see how my research has progressed.

Page updated

Report abuse