I'll bet it woundn't be a major news story if Jon Benet were a black

[saracat]

child from a poor family! But then no effort would have been made to find the killer at all, if this even is the killer!It ticks me off that live children are still missing in New Orleans and they can't even get a sentence worth of print but this will be given 24 hour coverage!

[Richard Steele]

1. You'd WIN that bet, and that's a damn FACT. nm

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[cynatnite]

6. Exactly n/t

[REP]

3. The Ramseys Were Convicted In The Press and Public Opinion for a Decade

I'm one of the ones who still think the Ramseys were deeply wrong to dress up their child like a streetwalker and pimp her out to beauty shows, but today's news shows they were telling the truth - they didn't actually murder their daughter, no matter what the press implied for a decade.

[raccoon]

16. There was that hokey ransom note that made them look damn suspicious. nt

[Clark2008]

22. It does?

Funny... I don't remember Karr's trial and subsequent conviction occurring in less than 24 hours.

[saracat]

26. Does it? Don't you have ANY questions?

How is it possible that someone the Ramsey's had never met knew the location of the childs bedroom, and the location of the obscure wine celler? How is it possible he knew about private financial dealings that he mentioned in the note?And , not having had an income for years what has he been living on while traveling around the world? Was there a trail I missed? Isn't he still innocent till proven guilty? How do you know the confession wasn't cooerced? Thailand is vicious to people accused of anything.They still cut off hands of theives! This was the country that whipped the American kid for graffitti!I don't buy any of the media spin on this .I don't know if the Ramsey's are guilty but I don't know if this guy is either.The trial just has to play itself out.

[jobycom]

4. Supposedly there are no more missing children in New Orleans.

Several months ago (May, I think) they located the last child reported missing. She had been separated from her mother and wound up with her godmother, who was evacuated someplace else. They were finally able to locate each other and were reunited. Very touching scene. Last I heard there were just a couple hundred people still listed as missing. Some dead, of course. Others just lost in the shuffle. Some maybe trying not to be found. That was a couple months ago, the number may have gone down since then.

[itzamirakul]

12. Thanks for this update on the missing children from NOLA...

I have wondered quite often what was happening to try to locate those youngsters and reunite them with their parents/families.

It certainly has not been major news story of the decade, as I wsould think it should be. Over 3,000 American children reported missing as a result of a forced relocation on the part of the government.

But rather tha give us news about that, the msm would rather focus on the possibilities of antisemitism in the vote against Lieberman.

How many inches of space and ink would it have taken to give us a weekly update on the status of the missing children.

[jobycom]

20. Well, the "missing" children weren't really missing in many cases.

The media covered it a bit, but the story was quite confusing, anyway. People heare "missing children" after a hurricane, and stories start that most of them are dead, or that no one is doing anything to find them. It wasn't as clear cut as that.

After the hurricane, people all over the country tried to find relatives and friends in the area. Any time you searced online for a way to find out about relatives (I had to go through this, though all of mine were fine), you wound up on sites that encouraged you to fill out a missing person's report. I had started to fill one out on my parents, even, when they finally contacted me.

So a lot of people filled out reports to find people who were perfectly fine and would not have considered themselves lost. I was on the Coast in Mississippi, for instance, right after the hurricane, and I was helping an old friend of my parents rescue her dogs from her house, which had gone under thirty feet of water. While we were there, her in-laws from Baton Rouge showed up. THey had been trying to locate her for a week, had put out missing persons reports on her, and had come to the house several times looking for her. This was in an abandoned part of Bay St. Louis--all the houses were destroyed, you could barely get back in there with a four wheeler, and the whole area smelled of dead animals and toxic muck. This friend of ours had told everyone she was going to stay in her house, and then just before dark got scared and drove about ten miles north to stay at another friend's house--this friend had actually fled further north, so the house was empty. Anyway, most relatives thought she was dead or missing, so she was filed as missing. She wasn't--she had a circle of friends around her, she was staying with friends, and we knew where she was, but she was missing to some people.

A lot of names were like that. Divorced parents lost touch with each other, so the non-custodial parent would file missing children reports. After the post-hurricane evacuation, families were separated, and moved sometimes to several different evacuation sites, so even families were pulled apart. It's harder than you think figuring out where someone is in this country, even for adults. This last child that was found was in Atlanta, her parents were in San Antonio. For something like 9 months the parents couldn't find their child, but she was alive and safe.

So a lot of the "missing" people weren't missing, but they were missing to a few people. And of course someone would file a report, then find the person they were looking for, and never tell the people they filed the report with. Plus, scanning through the lists, you saw things like "Missing--six or seven year old child. Lisa. Last Name unknown. Race unknown." Not much way to track that. Or you saw clear mistakes--my favorite was a missing family named "Abear." Anyone in New Orleans (and many NFL fans) would recognize that name as "Hebert." No chance they would ever be found under "Abert," and very little chance that the person who reported them missing even knew them that well, if they didn't know how to spell the name.

So the media didn't spend a lot of time on the "missing" lists because they were a jumble, and the people who made the lists were constantly telling everyone that the lists were misleading, that out of 6,000 people probably only a few hundred were actually missing.

The real failure, and what the media reported sometimes but not enough, is that government wasn't doing enough to resolve these issues. FEMA and HS evacuated people to all corners of the planet and never bothered making a detailed list of who went where. They never even, as far as I know, coordinated their lists of people asking for assistance with the missing persons lists.

Anyway, sorry to ramble on. This story was so poorly reported that people have all kinds of misunderstandings of what was happening.

[itzamirakul]

24. Thanks for helping to clear that up for me... I was livid for quite awhile

because of reports that we heard that upwards of 3000 children were missing...not so much as a result of the hurricane/flood, but because they had been loaded onto one bus or plane and their parents were loaded onto another and then each bus and plane went to different locations.

It is the kind of situation that makes you soooo angry but you don't know HOW to help. The msm didn't make it any better because they never cleared up the situation. For the longest while I have wondered how they were keeping those parents quiet if their kids were still missing.

[saracat]

25. Thanks but the point is, we would NOT have known this information

because it was not reported in an meaningful way, yet we will know ALL the details od Jon Benet!

[jobycom]

28. It was reported, it just wasn't paid any attention to

Go back and scan posts on DU about the missing kids in NOLA. A few people would try to explain why only some of them were missing, but the vast majority of posters just shouted "CONSPIRACY!" and ignored any factually based discussion of the subject. The media also reported it, but people were paying no attention--they knew what they wanted the story to be (on both sides) and wrote it themselves.

Not to mention that the media grew frustrated reporting something that everyone immediately wanted to refute and yell "CONSPIRACY, COVER-UP!" over. People can understand a dead child and a sex offender. People can't grasp the nuances of a list of missing people. Even DU proved that.

[saigon68]

5. Or a Brown Iraqi child blown to bits by the Chimp

[HuffleClaw]

7. i've never understood the media's obsession over this case

i guess it boils down to 'cute white girl...'

[Bjornsdotter]

8. I think that is a part of it

I also think that the day she was murdered factored in, also the "mystery" of her being killed in her home, her parents were wealthy and the fact that JonBenet competed in pageants all played a role with the media.

Cheers

[progdonkey]

11. it's not just "cute white girl"...

For me it was always clear that the biggest selling point of this story was the footage of her at those beauty pageants.

If all they really had were some old home videos or just that one ubiquitous photo of her, I doubt it would've become as big as it did.

But instead they had footage of this five-year-old girl dolled up like a Vegas stripper. It was perfect footage for the media, which loves to always talk tittilatingly about how slutty girls are while claiming pure objectivity. This was just an extreme, where the girl in question was only five and she was murdered, but it follows the media's obsession with needing to sexualize girls as much as possible, all the while maintaining that they're just performing a public service in declaring that 80% of 12-year-old girls have performed a BJ at least once, or some such shit. "Are girls growing up too soon? Watch this video of a five-year-old dressed up like a showgirl and tell us what you think! Don't worry, we'll be showing the video over and over again."

[HuffleClaw]

29. well put indeed

and thanks to 'news' shows like dateline nbc etc... we get treated to all sorts of crap, each show trying to outdo each other with the most sensationalized version of story x.

[FearofFutility]

17. "Cute white girl" with rich parents n/t

[Blue_State_Elitist]

9. And?

n/t

[Philosoraptor]

10. Maybe, if they were beauty pageant queens

we will just have to endure the jon benet story for a few more months as the world burns.

[LittleClarkie]

13. Oh, I think if she was a six year old black beauty pagent winner

with tons of video of her dancing around in outfits and makeup way to old for her, so that people could click their tongues at how stage parents mistreat these children by putting them in beauty pagents, the coverage would be about the same. It was the beauty pagent aspect that the media played up and judged, regardless of whether or not it had to do with the murder.

But then, you have to remember, that the media has been latching onto these stories, one right after the other, leaving you wondering what the big deal is about THIS story that makes it stand out from all the others. I think it's so that the media has something to cover other than the news.

[izzie]

14. Well those kids are just kids. Jon was a freak or made to be one.

If a black mother did that to her child the state I bet would have taken her away. But then We used to read about the Jackson's as they were sort of a freak show. We seem to like to read about these odd kids. We usually do better when they have talent like the Jacksons. With this little girl it was sad as she sure could not sing or dance but there she was like a pet for all to see. And most of the kids in the local school looked as good as her. It was just plain sad. It had to be her mother.

[zbdent]

15. Did they ever find that little black girl in Florida under Jeb's watch?

You know the one where he blamed Childrens' Services (or the local equivalent) after the kid was missing for a year and a half before anybody really noticed? This was announced about the same time that the media hype was going overdrive about the murder of JBR ...

(I don't remember the name because there never was a media blitz for the little black girl ...)

Of course, everybody knows the name of the Cuban kid, Elian Gonzalez, because he was used to smear Clinton/Gore ...

[johnnie]

18. .

:eyes:

[1932]

19. If she were black, her father would probably be on death row right now.

[fishwax]

27. probably true

good point

[LynneSin]

21. Or if it was a white kid from a low income family

She was pretty, white, and parents had money.

Nuff said

[BlooInBloo]

23. Neat-o! The HIDDEN "it's not about race, it's about class" move!

Genius!