Why Do We Cover a Missing Blond White Women as Innocent?

More than a decade ago, a Canadian researcher tracked local media coverage given to cases of missing Indigenous and missing white women. You can probably guess what that revealed. Since then, however, Canada and other countries have spent time discussing racial bias, and attempting to correct it. Canada even had an entire national inquiry dedicated to the travesty of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Yet in late summer, when a pretty young white woman named Gabby Petito disappeared, none of that mattered. The media was flooded with a continent-wide search for Petito while Indigenous and Black women who had vanished just as recently were barely mentioned. Why is this phenomenon so pervasive and how has seemingly nothing aside from words changed in a decade?

GUEST: Kristen Gilchrist-Salles, researcher

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