Friday, August 24, 2007

Madeleine McCann, Rhys Jones and the British Media

First off let me offer my condolences to the Parents of Rhys Jones and my deepest sympathies to Madeleine McCann's Parents. I pray that God comforts them at their time of loss and pain. No caring parent deserves to have a child taken away from them in the circumstances of either of these cases. My thoughts and deepest sympathies are with both sets of parents.

Do Missing, Stabbed or Shot Children need to be white to make Page One news?
I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone of the media circus that surrounded the Madeleine McCann case. David Beckham went on TV urging for information, a £2.5 million reward fund was launched and the parents were granted an audience with the Pope.

The Rhys Jones case is barely 36 hours old and it is all over the newspapers and TV and one can sense the momentum building. I would like to reiterate the statement of Sir Ian Blair, and accuse the british media of institutional racism in their reporting. The media choose which stories they would like to be front page and then they launch blanket publicity of certain cases which sometimes leads to mass public hysteria. Is it a coincidence that the children in both these cases are photogenic white children?

Does no one remember the black kids shot dead over the last 6 months; Kamilah Peniston, 12; Michael Dosunmu, 15; Adam Regis, 15; or stabbed to death Paul Erhahon, 14; or the missing Elizabeth Ogungbayibi, 6 or Dorothy Powell, 9? What do we need to do for these cases to gain more attention?

2 comments:

guerreiranigeriana said...

oh, so you have the same problem in the uk (i'm assuming that that is where you are) as in the us?...i find it fascinating to compare and contrast the way in which they talk about the *victims* in these cases, when they are white and when they are black...very telling...i've just come to accept that you have to be famous or use photoshop to make your child look white to get any favorable and sympathetic news exposure...

Kush said...

Yes black victims get little attention in the press in the UK (with the notable exceptions of Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence, and in both cases the parents had to fight long and hard) but black perpetrators of crime get lots of airplay...