You go where the money is

by Tom Nadeau

Hasn’t Eugene Robinson looked around?

The pathological cable news obsession with young, attractive white women who unfortunately vanish continues unabated. Yes, the nation is still transfixed by Damsels in Distress -- only now it's gotten worse: The media are suddenly obsessed with their own obsession.

Won't somebody please just make it stop?
How silly of me; of course no one is going to make it stop. Certainly not Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who's spent so much time in Aruba looking for blond, missing Natalee Holloway that she probably qualifies for a Dutch passport. Leaving no stone or sand dollar unturned, Van Susteren has ridden this sad little story to her best Nielsen ratings ever. (1)

Robinson has not been reading 800-page grocery stand paperbacks, going to the cinema, or watching TV movies. "Woman in peril," as other critics have termed such fare for many years, are a staple of American literature.

The heroines are generally white, youngish, slim, good-looking, stylishly dressed and living either in a cosmopolitan city or some quaint vacation address (Manhattan, LA, or Malibu, Maine coast, Florida keys, etc.).

They are always portrayed as smarter and more attuned to pyschic subtleties than their family and friends. They are independently wealthy, or at least have no visible means of support. They never have a regular job from which they can’t take extended sabbaticals to solve life-threatening mysteries.

The peril these women face, the trouble they get into is never their fault. Friends family and authority figures never see the threat posed by mysterious strangers, weird husbands, roaming psychopaths, shadowy aliens, evil ghosts. These onlookers never pick up on the problem until the end and those who did help generally get killed (except if this aiding party is a kindly angel or ghost from the past) leaving the heroine always triumphant, with a hug for the boyfriend that doubted them or the child they rescued.

Some 80 (or thereabouts) percent of mass market novels are written by white women and bought by white women. The TV movie audiences are similarly dominated, but with many more teenage and early 20s girls thrown in.

Why would television news – now owned by a handful of big dollar conglomerates looking for more money – be different?
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(1) Cable can’t get beyond the pale, Eugene Robinson, New York Times via Media Channel, Aug. 12, 2005