By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
With America deeply immersed in another vicious season of pro-whiteness, led by non-other than an impulse-driven American President, you would think that our mainstream media would be going the extra mile to highlight the inequities being caused. To believe that would be to completely ignore mainstream media’s history of prominently covering the European American (White) majority, providing what amounts to proportionate crumbs of coverage to other racial groups. Collectively, mainstream media makes undeniably clear who is valued in this country and who is not.
The example du jour is the disappearance of Nancy Gutherie, the mother of Today Show host Savannah Gutherie. Nancy Gutherie went missing from her Arizona home January 31, 2026. The wall-to-wall coverage by mainstream media was unceasing. Cable networks created extra shows dedicated to the case. Broadcast stations were giving updates at every airing. Layers of experts in law enforcement, security, and investigation were brought on camera to lend their thoughts, experience, and opinions. Anchors were dispatched to Tucson with the hope of being able to deliver Breaking News. Any update in the case, even when it seems like no real update at all, became news. Several cable and broadcast websites even installed a tab at the top of their page dedicated to The Gutherie Case.
Any family that can’t find their mother, 84-years-old or not, would be horrified. Any family with any of its members missing would be unconsolable. Surely, this is a tragedy for the Gutherie Family, and good people across this nation remain hopeful for a positive resolution. This writer, out of respect, held this story for two months but now I am bringing it forward as Savannah Gutherie has returned to her anchor chair at the Today Show.
Can anyone think of a time when broadcast, print, or cable has saturated us with coverage of a missing Black person for two days, two weeks, or over a month – as has been the case with The Gutherie Case? When will their CEO’s, shareholders, producers, anchors, publishers and journalists, value all people equally and provide coverage proportionally? What has to happen before these powerful people change their ways?
The Black People Missing Foundation, a non-profit launched in 2008 by sister’s-in-law Derrica Wilson and Natalie Wilson, strives to bring attention and change to the systemic inequity. They met with veteran journalist Kevin Johnson, a white man, and staff member at the National Press Foundation, for a piece titled, “Missing White Women Get Disproportionate Attention While 40% of Those Missing Are People of Color,” in early January 2024. An update to the story, on January 29, 2024, used the word “shunned.”
Say it again – 40 percent of those missing in the United States are not white. “We are met with silence,” says Natalie Wilson describing the common response from news outlets. The women shared, “a collective desensitization to such cases, based on damaging stereotypes associating minoritized communities to criminal activity and poverty, have kept the plight of Black and other victims of color out of the public eye.”
“We have been fighting an uphill battle,” Natalie Wilson told journalists at the Crime Coverage Summit hosted by the Radio Television Digital News Association and the National Press Foundation. “It has gotten better, but we are being shunned by the media, too. We want our missing to be household names, too. That’s what we are trying to change because these are our mothers, our fathers, our children that are disappearing at an alarming rate and we need to bring them home or to provide much-needed answers for their families.” Learn more about the Black and Missing Foundation, Inc. at https://www.blackandmissinginc.com.
Jonathan Franklin reports on race at the intersection of culture, identity, and justice for National Public Radio. On December 5, 2022, he wrote,” Thousands of people are reported missing in the United States each year. And while not every missing person case will get widespread media coverage, the fight to locate them — whether alive or dead — is always the main priority. However, when it comes to missing person cases involving people of color, that same media attention quickly dissolves, ultimately feeding into the phenomenon of ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ — a phrase coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill that addresses the media’s fascination with covering attractive, middle class-looking white women in comparison to missing persons of color.
This so-called media phenomenon never sat right with Kyle Pope, the former editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), who in an interview with NPR said, “Something had to be done – Everybody talks about it and says we got to do something about it, and nothing happens. If you go missing and the press devotes a lot of attention to it, you have a better chance of a decent outcome, whereas you don’t if they ignore it.”
In a news release, Columbia Journalism Review, a respected voice of press criticism since 1961, announced a new tool allowing users to openly share the “press value” of missing persons. It’s called, “Are You Press Worthy,” and estimates that younger white women will get increasingly more news coverage than other racial groups like Black, Latino, and Indigenous people. Analyzing the database allowed researchers to conclude that the implications of this are literally life and death — the amount of media coverage you get immediately after you go missing has a direct result on what happens to your case,” per Pope.
We live in a country where many forms of systemic racism operate to different degrees. Mainstream media is just one area. Others include education, policing, criminal sentencing, healthcare access and quality, and the staggering wealth gap for people of color. Nothing changes if nothing changes.
We remain hopeful Nancy Gutherie will be found safe. We also remain hopeful that mainstream media will begin to use their power equitably. It could have a direct result on the outcome for 40% of America’s missing – the ones who are not white.
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