This is interresting!
Jun 18, 2005
White, Pretty, Rich: Media Biased On Missing Persons
By MICHELLE BEARDEN
[email protected]
Photo by: ROBERT BURKE
Larry Dages speaks about the suspicious disappearance of his daughter Bonnie Lee and her infant son, Jeremy. Dages still grieves; public interest in the case has faded. The case remains open, with no leads.
Their disappearance on April 28, 1993, barely made local news. The 18-year-old single mother and her son are just two more sad statistics, but not for their still-grieving family and friends.
``It's as if nobody cares. Not just about my daughter but other daughters out there who are gone,'' says Larry Dages, the Lithia father who can never forget. ``Maybe people just get tired of hearing about it.''
Yet, other missing girls and women have become fixtures in our national memory: Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Lori Hacking, Chandra Levy, Dru Sjodin and now Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teen who vanished in Aruba while on a senior class trip.
All white, attractive females from middle- and upper-class families, their stories were told and retold beyond regional markets and became fodder for national media, from newspapers to 24-hour cable TV news.
``The lesson is this: If you're a missing older Asian lesbian, your story probably won't see the light of day,'' says Cynthia Lont, professor of communication at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. ``And if the parents aren't educated and don't give good sound bites, you are really out of luck.''
Of the nearly 47,600 missing-adult cases being tracked by the FBI in May, 53 percent were men and 29 percent were black.
The media obsession with beautiful women effectively masks that, Lont says.
Minorities, men and women living hardscrabble lives rarely make it past the police reports. At least five gay men have gone missing from the Tampa area since 1995. Yet until investigators connected them to the rape, torture and killings of two other Tampa men, their disappearances went largely unnoticed by the media.
However, if all the elements are there - including a good hook to reel in the media - some contend a case quickly can become a national cause.
Tiffany Sessions, of Valrico, a pretty blond college student with well-connected parents, made national news after she disappeared Feb. 9, 1989, while on her daily power walk in Gainesville. CNN showed up. Former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, actor Robert Conrad, ``America's Most Wanted'' host John Walsh and Jeb Bush appeared in public service announcements pleading for her return.
The then-20-year-old University of Florida student has never been found.
You Need A Hook
Her mother, Hilary Sessions, turned grief into action. She has made more than 1,000 trips to Gainesville to follow up on tips and meet with police, she says. She has braved at least 170 visits to morgues to view unidentified bodies. She has consulted with psychics, lobbied Congress for stronger laws and devoted countless hours to volunteer work on behalf of missing children. She's the executive director of Children Protection Education of America, a nonprofit group based in Tampa.
Sessions acknowledges that there is bias in the media.
``Face it, you can't put them all out there because that's all the media would be reporting,'' she says.
In Florida in 2004, 51,000 children were reported missing. Many were runaways who came home within days or hours, so the media must be discriminating on what cases to pursue, she says.
With the disappearance of her daughter, an only child whose bedroom remains filled with stuffed animals, Sessions, 59, says she learned a lot getting the word out.
``It helps to have a compelling story. If you don't have a hook, you won't get the media,'' she says. ``And when you get the media, don't be a blathering crybaby in front of the camera, no matter how emotional you feel. You need to get your point across at an elevated level in order to connect to mainstream America.''
A competent and articulate spokesman helps, says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at The Poynter Institute, a journalism studies center in St. Petersburg. Also, it doesn't hurt to have powerful video or compelling photos of the victim that can tug at the emotions of strangers.
``The media is more likely to respond if the family can provide the elements they need,'' she says. ``Images definitely drive news stories, especially in the age of the Internet, where words are devalued.''
Smart, of Utah, was a classic case, McBride says. A beautiful, talented girl from a religious, well-to-do family gets snatched from her bed in the middle of the night. It's not a messy custody battle. It's a mystery, and it's every parent's nightmare.
And it fits neatly into a story that can be told in a short amount of time and space to a broad audience, McBride says. The simpler and more clear- cut the story is, the better it plays nationally.
Mother And Child Vanish
It's not all about the family, though, McBride adds. If law enforcement doesn't raise an alarm about a case, the media may be equally dismissive. It's up to reporters to dig a little deeper and ask appropriate questions: Why isn't there more urgency on this case? Do you know something we don't know?
``Sometimes, there's too much readiness to buy into the law enforcement line,'' she says.
Bonnie Lee Dages and her son got little press or air time, despite the compelling elements of their story.
When the two first disappeared, two area newspapers (including The Tampa Tribune) ran a short news brief. A few segments aired on Bay area TV stations. Later in the year, a couple of longer articles appeared, and after that, their names occasionally cropped up in other stories.
Not long before she vanished, Dages had inherited a good sum of money, ``less than $50,000, but still in five figures,'' a Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokesman said a few days after her disappearance. On April 28, she withdrew $15,075 from the bank and went to meet a friend.
That was the last time anyone saw her.
Her 1986 silver Dodge Caravan was found two days later in a parking lot at a Kash n' Karry at Lumsden and Lithia- Pinecrest roads, with her purse and the baby's diaper bag locked inside.
``It's as if they vanished into thin air,'' says sheriff's Capt. Craig Latimer. ``We got nothing. It's not only a case of who- done-it, it's a case of where-is- it.''
Sheriff's deputies conducted more than 700 interviews on the case, consulted a psychic, and searched for the pair by helicopter, mounted posse and on foot, Latimer says. From the beginning, the disappearance was labeled suspicious.
The case remains open, although leads nearly have come to a standstill. The last activity came on May 24, 2004, when the remains of an unidentified female were found in Pennsylvania. Another dead end.
An Angry, Grieving Father
For Larry Dages, 59, the loss of his daughter and first grandchild is a pain that never goes away. It's even worse this week, as he faces yet another Father's Day without his child, the eldest of five for him and his wife, Linda.
After six years, he had Bonnie Lee and Jeremy declared legally dead. But with no bodies and no answers, it didn't make things any easier.
``I get waking nightmares, the kind that come during the day,'' Dages says. He believes his daughter was killed, and he has an idea who did it, but investigators never could prove it.
He still has a lot of anger. He doesn't think deputies really cared about solving the case or demonstrated much urgency. They were judgmental about her being a single, teenage mother, he says.
Dages, a farrier by trade, admits he wasn't always an articulate spokesman during the few opportunities when he had the media's attention. Sometimes he ranted and raved; other times he broke down and cried. It's hard to be eloquent in the midst of so much frustration, he says.
He had one moment in the national spotlight. A year after Bonnie Lee and Jeremy disappeared, Dages got to tell his story on ``The Montel Williams Show.'' No other media followed up.
He doesn't fault the missing people who get national media attention. The media like sexy stories, he says, and maybe theirs just didn't cut it. Fairness is something he no longer expects from life. Now he's more concerned about justice.
``I do believe the killer will be caught one day,'' he says. ``I just hope it happens in my lifetime, that's all.''
Researcher Angela Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Information from The Associated Press was used. Reporter Michelle Bearden can be reached at (813) 259-7613.
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http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBNPB1B3AE.html
