If You Aren’t Pretty, We Don’t Care

I can’t believe I am about to write this, but I’ve got my ranting pants on, so here it goes:

Why hasn’t there been more coverage of the shooting at the New Orleans Mother’s Day parade?  I work in a place where CNN is on all day long, so I’ve been inundated with sexy murderesses, foreign looking bombers, and evil dungeon masters for the past several weeks.  Right now, the story being played ad nauseum is the psychotic abortionist.  But nothing about the shooting in New Orleans.

Well, not nothing.  Halfway down the page, the day after the shooting, there was a small link accompanied by a photo that was–see for yourself, and think about what the photos from Boston looked like in comparison.

The journalistic point behind having photos go along with stories is to add depth and draw empathy, the marketing point is to drive clicks.  Photos are carefully chosen because, to paraphrase the old addage, they tell the story cheaper, faster, and more effectively than screeds.  That picture?  That picture says, “We’re going to make fun of WalMart shoppers!”

So, the sexy murderess is a white girl who killed a white man.  The foreign looking bombers killed a white child, a white woman, and an Asian student, and wounded a whole lot of athletic white people.  The evil dungeon master abducted and tormented three, pretty white girls.  The psychotic abortionist killed live babies (we don’t know if they were white, but they were babies, and we aren’t racists until after children have hit puberty.)  Judging from the photo, the people affected by the NO shooting were a) Not White, b) Not Athletic, c) Not Attractive, d) Adults. I can only assume that these are the reasons we haven’t heard about it.

Look, when even MY mother says, “You know if they’d shot up white people, we’d have heard about it,” there is a big issue.

Is that it?  Is that why it isn’t getting the same level of coverage?  It was a Mother’s Day parade and 19 people were injured!  By a shooter!  With all the media attention focused on gun control right now, and a SHOOTING at a MOTHER’S DAY PARADE is getting the amount of attention usually reserved for a 2-alarm fire?  You know how I found out about it–with CNN blaring in my ears all day–one passing mention of it in my Facebook feed.  I wouldn’t have known it had happened at all otherwise.

We’ve covered that national attention rarely highlights missing minority children.

And that the media largely ignores missing black women.

What can we do?

How do we change the narrative so that color and socio-economic status aren’t what drives media coverage?

As a bonus rant:  WTF is wrong with these women who are throwing themselves at the remaining Boston bomber?  Are they mental?!