RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Aruba

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Jim Jackson said:
You know, I don't normally advocate violence or the invasion of a soverign country, but this situation in Aruba with the young missing woman and now the information that the father of one of the suspects, and himself a judge, has been arrested in connection with this case, really makes me want to turn a few of our warheads on that island and ORDER them to cooperate or we make Aruba a thing of the past.

That may be the longest sentence I ever wrote.

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Jim Jackson said:
You know, I don't normally advocate violence or the invasion of a soverign country, but this situation in Aruba with the young missing woman and now the information that the father of one of the suspects, and himself a judge, has been arrested in connection with this case, really makes me want to turn a few of our warheads on that island and ORDER them to cooperate or we make Aruba a thing of the past.

That may be the longest sentence I ever wrote.

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Wednesday said:

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Jim Jackson said:
You know, I don't normally advocate violence or the invasion of a soverign country, but this situation in Aruba with the young missing woman and now the information that the father of one of the suspects, and himself a judge, has been arrested in connection with this case, really makes me want to turn a few of our warheads on that island and ORDER them to cooperate or we make Aruba a thing of the past.

That may be the longest sentence I ever wrote.

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I think you're crazy.

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Jeff Gannon said:

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Jim Jackson said:
You know, I don't normally advocate violence or the invasion of a soverign country, but this situation in Aruba with the young missing woman and now the information that the father of one of the suspects, and himself a judge, has been arrested in connection with this case, really makes me want to turn a few of our warheads on that island and ORDER them to cooperate or we make Aruba a thing of the past.

That may be the longest sentence I ever wrote.

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You're so sexy when you get all butch and macho like that.

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Jim Jackson said:

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Wednesday said:

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Jim Jackson said:
You know, I don't normally advocate violence or the invasion of a soverign country, but this situation in Aruba with the young missing woman and now the information that the father of one of the suspects, and himself a judge, has been arrested in connection with this case, really makes me want to turn a few of our warheads on that island and ORDER them to cooperate or we make Aruba a thing of the past.

That may be the longest sentence I ever wrote.

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I think you're crazy.

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I'm simply taking an extreme approach (geez, ya ever hear of hyperbole?) to express my ongoing frustration about this situation in Aruba.

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Wednesday said:
Oh, and I think you're crazy.

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Pariah said:
What happened in Aruba.

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Pariah said:
What happened in Aruba.

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Wednesday said:
An American girl went missing on the island of Aruba. The girl is white and blonde and the possible suspects have color in their skin, so the news media, CIA, FBI, and several senators have all become involved.

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the G-man said:
Yeah, but the media goes crazy whenever any reasonably attractive young woman vanishes.

Remember the whole "Runaway Bride" fiasco recently? That didn't happen in a country full of "people [with] color in their skin."

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Wednesday said:
Also, there are a good number of reasonably attractive women of all races who vanish. Only the white ones make national news, though.

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General Zod said:
Come on nobodys saying it but im sure u guys have thought it, the reason some high-school kid disapeared on a dutch held isiland is simple. White Bitches can fetch alot of money

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Wednesday said:
Also, there are a good number of reasonably attractive women of all races who vanish. Only the white ones make national news, though.

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ORANJESTAD, Aruba — The three young men detained in the Natalee Holloway (search) case have reportedly been charged with murder.

Aruba's chief prosecutor told The Associated Press Friday that the murder charges were filed soon after the suspects were arrested more than three weeks ago. Those charged include Joran van der Sloot (search), 17, and his friends, Surinamese brothers Deepak Kalpoe, 21, and Satish Kalpoe, 18, Aruban Attorney General Karin Janssen said.

Janssen explained that the charges weren't announced until now to protect the family of the missing honors student from Alabama.

"At the time, we didn't want to upset the (Holloway) family talking about murder while they searched," Janssen said.

Janssen, who has said several times in the past three weeks that no one was charged in the case, said they also kept the information quiet in order not to compromise their investigation. Authorities have said they have no physical evidence suggesting Holloway is dead.

The three suspects were charged when they were arrested 10 days after Holloway disappeared on May 30. They were the last people seen with Natalee.

Also Friday, Aruba's government defended its handling of the investigation, saying many of the criticisms arose from misunderstandings of the Dutch legal system used on the Caribbean (search) island.

Police have been criticized for letting more than a week go by without detaining the three young men last seen with Holloway and for waiting 16 days after she went missing before searching van der Sloot's home.

Ruben Trapenberg, spokesman for Prime Minister Nelson Oduber (search), said the government has put 21 detectives on the case.

Trapenberg also mentioned the 70 Dutch Marines on the island who helped in initial searches and were called back Thursday to comb the island again.

"They do not bungle cases," Trapenberg told The Associated Press. "Aruban police and prosecutors are professional forces that have been successful."

Prosecutors have an 89 percent conviction rate on the Dutch Caribbean island, he said. Violent crime is rare in the tourist haven.

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Wingnut-EL said:
Hey G-Man. Don't know if you remember me, I haven't posted in a long time. If I read your sig correctly, my deepest sympathies on the loss of G-Dog. Dogs are great & definitely family. As a show of belated respect, I shall now listen to Dave Alvin's Ashgrove cd in his honor (twice). If I remember correctly you are an Alvin fan, so please take this in the spirit intended.

R.I.P. G-Dog

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Wednesday said:
Holy crap on a crapstick! That dude is white!

God help us.

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Wednesday.

I am very, very disappointed that it appears you immediately bought into the old stereotypes and assumed the perpetrators of a heinous crime would be persons of color.

In the future, please try to put your prejudices aside.

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August 5, 2005

MEDIA
Not only Natalee is missing

Is the media inattention to missing women who aren't white due to deliberate racism or unconscious bias?

By Anne-Marie O'Connor

As one of America's new breed of media critics, Philadelphia blogger Richard Blair watched for weeks as the media devoted intense coverage to the story of the May 30 disappearance of Natalee Holloway while on a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

Then, on July 18, another young woman went missing, this one in his hometown. Photos of LaToyia Figueroa, 24, show the kind of smiling, attractive young woman whose disappearance has become a staple of television news coverage, particularly cable news, in recent years.


Melvin Figueroa holds a photo of his pregnant 24-year-old daughter, LaToyia, who was last seen in Philadelphia on July 18.
(Coke Whitworth / AP)

Except for one thing, a growing chorus of critics say: Figueroa, five months pregnant and the mother of a 7-year-old, comes from a lower-income black family, while the missing women regularly portrayed on television are overwhelmingly white. Her frustrated family had resorted to picketing on a busy street corner to draw attention to her disappearance when Blair and other Philadelphia bloggers took up Figueroa's case.

"Certainly Natalee Holloway's story is tragic in its own right," Blair said. "But what makes it more newsworthy than a five-month pregnant mother?"

"I think this is part of a larger discussion: Who's news, who's newsworthy, and who's making these decisions," Blair said. "I think race is a factor, as well as economic status."

Criticism of the media disparity has increased with the growth of the news genre focusing on missing women. While the media seem to focus on a parade of attractive disappeared white women — from Laci Peterson and Chandra Levy to "runaway bride" Jennifer Wilbanks, the scores of missing black and Latina women garner little or no national attention, critics say.

The decapitated body of Evelyn Hernandez, 24, who was nine months pregnant, was discovered in the San Francisco Bay a few months before Peterson, but she did not touch off a firestorm of coverage. Nor did the disappearance of Ardena Carter, 23, a pregnant black graduate student who was last seen alive on her way to the library in Georgia in 2003. The remains of Carter and her unborn child turned up in the woods two months later.

"I don't think a media director is sitting around saying, 'Hey, there's this black woman in Philadelphia and she disappeared and we don't care,' " said Todd Boyd, USC professor of critical studies. "It's an unconscious decision about who matters and who doesn't.

"In general, there is an assumption that crime is such a part of black and Latino culture, that these things happen all the time," Boyd said. "In many people's minds it's regarded as being commonplace and not that big a deal."

Mark Effron, vice president of MSNBC News Daytime Programming, disagrees. Effron said the stories of missing women typically bubble up from local network affiliates who are covering the stories based on the public outcry they generate in their home communities.

"It's not like there's a kind of cabal where MSNBC and CNN and Fox get together and say, 'Boy, this is a good one. That's not a good one,' " he said. "Usually, there's an involved family that tends to be sophisticated in how to use the media.

"I'm not disputing numbers. What I'm telling you is that we have never, ever, ever turned down a story based on race or any of those factors."

This week, he said, the network has devoted daily coverage to Figueroa's disappearance.

However, he said, since the controversy began, "we have had discussions with our staff, [saying] 'Let's just make sure. I know we're not doing anything purposely or maliciously or based on any kind of racial or age profiling, but let's just make sure,' " he said.

Concern over lack of attention to some cases is not just an issue of fairness. Early coverage of abductions can be crucial to finding the victims alive — a factor that the Philadelphia blogger said promoted his campaign.

"I have a daughter that's not much younger than LaToyia," said Blair, who posted the news on his blog, www.allspinzone.com. "In this kind of thing, every minute's crucial."

To some analysts, this gets to the heart of the media's failure to fulfill its public service duty in the case of many missing minority women.

In California, for example, nearly 7,500 Latinas are missing — almost double the number of white women — but they are far less likely to receive attention.

The disparity even extends to abducted children, the critics say. While the sexual assault and murder of JonBenet Ramsey in her Boulder, Colo., home made her a nationally known symbol of a parent's worst fears, no corresponding black girl has become a household name, says author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

"When you raise the issue, people say, 'This is a tragedy and we should do more,' " Hutchinson said. "But it only lasts a hot minute. It doesn't leave any lasting imprint in the newsrooms."

One media-savvy relative says her efforts to draw attention to the disappearance of her niece, 24-year-old Tamika Huston, failed to win the attention of local media outlets whose stories might be picked up by national news. The African American woman didn't come home one day in June 2004 in South Carolina. Rebka Howard, her aunt, is a Miami public relations executive, but her media contacts and family news conferences failed to generate the kind of immediate attention they had hoped for.

Controversy over the disparity has grown in recent months as cable news formats seem to have adopted stories of the missing women as a staple news item.

"If there's a void in developing news stories, these things become the fodder for keeping ratings up on cable news networks," said Andrew Kohut, executive director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "They go for cases that attract tabloid audiences. And tabloid audiences are traditionally more interested in what happens in the lives of rich people than middle-income people and especially poor people."

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and media studies at Pomona College, said the issue is more complex. The fact that media icons of missing women tend to be attractive white women is just one manifestation of American cultural myths about race and gender that have created a very specific archetype of the kind of woman who is considered a damsel in distress, she said.

"I'm not accusing anybody of conscious racism in telling particular stories," Fitzpatrick said. "If the public were clamoring for stories about the abuse of African American women and how they're damaged by it, probably CNN would be happy to give us that story."

Some analysts also blame a lack of newsroom diversity. Twenty-two percent of the staff of TV newsrooms are minorities, according to the Radio-Television News Directors Assn. An estimated 13% of newspaper journalists are minorities, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

It is simply less likely that a reporter will hear about a story emerging in a community that has less representation in the media, said Maria Len-Rios, an assistant at the Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia and the author of a recent study about the underrepresentation of women in the media.

"I think that when you look at the composition of the newsroom and the people that people in the newsroom know, there aren't many people from underrepresented communities," Len-Rios said. "We don't pay as much attention to someone missing from a community we don't know or are not familiar with."

Erin Bruno, the lead case manager for the National Center for Missing Adults in Phoenix, said her office sends out press releases daily on the 47,828 cases of missing adults they are tracking. They are a diverse pool: 29,553 white or Latino, 13,859 black, 1,199 Asian and 685 American Indian.

Yet "what we're seeing in the national media is a lot of young Caucasian females," Bruno said. "I've heard reporters sometimes look for stories that they can identify with, perhaps they themselves are Caucasian ... or maybe they're looking at who their audience is."

And the reporters' search for the "damsel in distress" leaves another huge group ignored — men, she said. Some 25,447 missing males are being tracked by the Phoenix group, compared with 22,379 females — a gap roughly mirrored by California statistics. Said Bruno: "Women are seen more as victims than men are."

Bruno said the Holloway disappearance has generated a new demand from the media for information on a greater diversity of missing women.

Media criticism over the coverage gap is growing. "When black women disappear, the media silence can be deafening," said a July 2005 article in Essence magazine. In a poll conducted last week by Black Entertainment Television's website, BET.com, 71% of respondents said they did not believe that the belated flurry of media attention to Figueroa's disappearance meant that minority women were "finally getting as much attention as whites."

Several media organizations asked for comment on the issue declined. CNN spokeswoman Laurie Goldberg said news executives were unavailable. Barbara Cochran, the president of the Radio-Television News Director's Assn., said in an e-mail she was unavailable. Fox News spokeswoman Dana Klinghoffer said that "a lot of people are out and unavailable. I just think it's one we're going to have to sit out."

To Marty Kaplan, the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the silence on the issue "suggests they don't have any good answers and they're a little embarrassed. What are they going to say?

"It does suggest that it is seeping into their consciousness how blatant it is that only white women are covered. News directors apparently believe the public is interested in every lurid tale about a white woman and not about the bad things happening across the country every day to people who are less photogenic and not Caucasian."

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Costas refuses to host show about Holloway

CNN wanted him to anchor show about girl who went missing in Aruba

Updated: 5:47 p.m. ET Aug. 19, 2005
NEW YORK - While some cable TV hosts are making their living off the Natalee Holloway case this summer, Bob Costas is having none of it.

Costas, hired by CNN as an occasional fill-in on “Larry King Live,” refused to anchor Thursday’s show because it was primarily about the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba. Chris Pixley filled in at the last minute.

“I didn’t think the subject matter of Thursday’s show was the kind of broadcast I should be doing,” Costas said in a statement. “I suggested some alternatives but the producers preferred the topics they had chosen. I was fine with that, and respectfully declined to participate.”

Costas’ manager declined to elaborate on what Costas didn’t like about the topic.

Thursday’s guests included Beth Holloway Twitty, the girl’s mother; a television reporter; and an investigator in the case. Seven of the show’s 10 guests talked about the missing girl, the other segments were about the BTK killer.

The Holloway case has been a big attraction on cable news networks during a slow news period, with Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren getting record ratings as she’s paid almost nonstop attention to it. Reports of Costas’ decision first surfaced on the mediabistro.com Web site on Friday.


“There were no hard feelings at all,” Costas said. “It’s not a big deal. I’m sure there are countless topics that will be mutually acceptable in the future.”

Wendy Walker, senior executive producer of “Larry King Live,” described it as a mutual decision for Costas not to do the show because he was uncomfortable with the subject matter.

“We love having Bob ... and since ‘Larry King Live’ covers an extremely extensive palate of subjects, there will always be shows that he will enjoy hosting,” she said.

The NBC Sports personality, also host of “Costas Now” on HBO, had agreed to be host for about 20 editions of “Larry King Live” this year. He’s done six, the network said.

His decision is reminiscent of Keith Olbermann, the former sportscaster who left his MSNBC news show in the late 1990s in part because he was asked to repeatedly cover the Monica Lewinsky story. Olbermann is back now for his second run at MSNBC.

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Faux National Tragedies:
Or Things Not to Worry About

Did Michael Jackson murder Jon Benet Ramsay? Was Samantha Runyon killed by Scott Peterson? Was Robert Blake behind the abduction of Elizabeth Smart? Aside from the 24/7 media's fixation with young, attractive, well-to-do white children, what do these episodes tell us about the crisis of American values, culture and society?

Nothing. As we reported all the way back in 1997 in the aftermath of the Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide, these faux national tragedies portend no larger societal breakdown. At best and definitely at most they can make us feel good about our own mental health.

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