Col#274- 2/20/26
MEDIA BIAS AND KIDNAPPING
By
Richard Davis
In our world of celebrity worship, you can garner mainstream media attention if you are famous or a close relative of a famous person. That means that ordinary people who are not considered newsworthy by the media can wallow in obscurity even if they suffer indignities that media attention could help relieve.
Case in point is the incessant media attention that the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, mother of news celebrity Savannah Guthrie, is receiving. She was kidnapped on February 1 and, as of this writing, she is still missing. There are few clues to her disappearance, but the mainstream media and law enforcement have given her case an inordinate amount of attention.
The Guthrie kidnapping is a tragic event, and it is creating a great deal of misery for a family. Fame does not provide immunity from suffering and people around the world are sympathetic to the plight of the Guthrie family.
But even members of the media are beginning question the amount of attention that the Guthrie kidnapping is receiving. If not for the fame of her daughter, Nancy Guthrie’s case would be worked on by law enforcement for a period of time and then start to receive less attention. It seems clear that fame is driving publicity and that is just a fact of life in the world in 2026.
There are so many other missing people who could benefit from media attention, but they are not famous and their lives do not provide fodder for today’s news, which is more entertainment than hard news.
Consider the plight of missing native American women. According to the Human Rights Research Center, “As of 2022 the National Crime Information Center reported 5487 cases of missing Native American women and girls in the United States, with a significant number of these cases involving girls 0-17 years old.”
These numbers are horrific, but the attention these lives receive is minimal. Once in a while a movie is made about the kidnapping and murder of Native American women, but the mainstream media does not consider the lives of these women newsworthy. They are not famous and they are part of a population that has been marginalized ever since white people starting invading their world. Little has changed in hundreds of years.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates that there are approximately 4200 missing and or murdered cases that remain unsolved, often due to lack of investigative resources and systemic issues in data collection. Imagine what a difference it would make to solving these cases if even a fraction of the resources devoted to the Guthrie case were used to look into the lives of missing Native American women.
Agencies that deal with the crimes against Native American women cite the lack of media attention as one of the reasons why so few of these cases are solved. The federal government does not provide the Native American population with the same law enforcement resources that the rest of the American population receives. Data collection is poor and the Human Rights Research Center also notes that poor record keeping, complex jurisdictional issues and a long history of racism and neglect by law enforcement makes it difficult to work on the cases of missing and murdered Native American women.
It is sad that Nancy Guthrie is missing. But it is even sadder that the lives of so many marginalized Native American women are not considered important in our world of celebrity worship.
