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By Seamus McGraw

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Victims who fail to fit the profile

The discrepancy is not lost, even on avid readers of such stories on this web site. In an informal poll last week, nearly 70 percent of the Crime Library readers who voted said that the media does not pay enough attention to missing person cases involving women of color.

Tamika Huston

That sentiment comes as no surprise to Rebkah Howard, a public relations professional in Miami , who has first hand experience with the media and missing women of color. In 2004, Howard's niece, Tamika Huston, vanished from her Spartanburg , S.C. home. For nearly a year, Howard maintained a lonely campaign to find her niece. Though the case attracted some attention in the national media, notably a brief mention on Van Sustern's "On the Record" and another on "America's Most Wanted," both Fox programs, Huston's disappearance never got the kind of traction that the other more high profile cases did. Even when her boyfriend, Christopher Hampton was arrested last August and charged with her murder, and led investigators to her remains, buried in a shallow grave, her skull and other bones missing, there was little media attention paid. And there is no reason to believe that there will be significantly more attention paid next April when Hampton 's trial begins.

Christopher Hampton

There is, in Howard's mind no question that there was "absolutely, without question" a discernable bias in the way the national media treated Tamika's case. "I mean...we reported her missing in June of 2004 and I immediately...launched an effort to get her story out there. The local media picked up on it pretty quickly which they usually do in cases of missing persons, but...it was very important for us to get the story out there as far and wide as possible and I was virtually ignored by everyone that I talked to."

The reasons, for the apparent bias however, are complex.

"I don't think its racism" on the part of news executives, Howard told Crime Library. "I don't think they sit in their morning news meetings and make conscious decisions not to cover these cases if they involve a black woman,"

Instead, Howard says, she there is a subtler form of bias at work. "Unfortunately, a lot of the decision makers in news tend to be white people...they have a tendency to identify with stories that they can relate to, she said. "They see Natalee Holloway and say, 'Oh My God, she looks like my daughter, she looks like my niece,' they really get drawn into these stories."

"Unfortunately I don't think that happens in cases involving minorities," she said.

But even more troubling, she says, is a kind of complacency that comes from the media's tendency to seek out the kinds of stories it has successfully done before.

"The networks and the cable news programs especially had a formula that worked for them and it involved young attractive, missing white women," Howard says, without a trace of anger in her voice. "And each one of those stories resolved themselves they were looking or the next one to plug in."

Howard experienced that first hand when the same news agencies that had overlooked Tamika's case, turned their full attention to the Lori Hacking case. "Lori Hackingwent missing three weeks after Tamika," Howard said. "I had just spent the preceding three weeks contacting all the same news programs, the same producers, all the same reporters who were covering her case...around the clock." All of them had virtually ignored Tamika's story. "I think I knew that there was bias, but it really brought it home for me that Tamika just didn't fit the profile."

There are, of course, cases where victims, people of color, have found champions, But those are perhaps, the exception rather than the rule.

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