Commentary
By STACEY MORRIS
Published in The Post-Star newspaper 7/25/02
Well, it's official: If your skin is darker than mine, your life is less important.
Think I'm off my rocker?
It's been all over the news.
Just listen to it, or should I say, look at it.
Splashed underneath the TV and newspaper headlines for weeks have been photographs of Elizabeth Smart: Blonde, fair-skinned, with a touchingly sweet smile.
The 14-year-old was abducted from her Salt Lake City home June 5. She's been missing without a trace ever since.
And because of the obsessive media coverage, we'll remember her name and face for years to come.
On the other hand, I'll bet you haven't a clue who Mitchell Owens is.
I'm not saying a child being abducted isn't news -- certainly it is. I can't think of many things more horrifying than a child being abducted. The only thing worse is the all-too-tragic outcome these cases often have: sexual assault, gruesome battery and murder.
But Elizabeth Smart is hardly an isolated incident -- child abductions happen all over the country.
If we're willing to be honest with ourselves, we have Elizabeth Smart's face memorized but have never heard of Mitchell Owens because of two reasons.
Race and class.
The media is enthralled with crime stories involving white children -- better yet, white and affluent children.
They'll go to any lengths to devote air time and beef up their reporting staff to cover the story from all angles.
A few weeks ago, I had to put a moratorium on watching my favorite 9 p.m. show, Larry King Live. All week long, the show's topic was set in stone: Elizabeth Smart's abduction.
Family, friends, friends of friends, detectives and other sundry theorists were all piped into King's studio via satellite for minute-by-minute updates. Often they congregated outside of the Smarts' palatial home as it loomed large in the background.
Ditto for Hannity & Colmes, Hardball and Headline News.
This is all shades of Jon Benet Ramsey, who, six and a half years after her murder, still makes headlines and tabloid covers.
The media's hypnotic attention to the Smart and Ramsey cases, while other child abductions go virtually unreported, sends out a disturbing message.
That the life of a white child, especially a white child from an affluent family, is more important than that of a non-Caucasian.
Unfortunately, there are thousands of children like Mitchell Owens, Jon Benet Ramsey and Elizabeth Smart who disappear each year.
Just ask Amy Angelo, an assistant at the Vanished Children's Alliance in San Jose, Calif. The alliance is a nonprofit organization established in 1980 and devoted to recovering missing children.
Angelo has seen the media pattern occur time and again.
"I heard about the little in girl in Philadelphia breaking free from her abductors," said Angelo. "But I heard nothing about her abduction."
In fact, so great a void was there in the media coverage on Erica Pratt, a 7-year-old who is African-American, being abducted in Philadelphia, Angelo wasn't even sure of the child's name.
If there's a word that comes to mind to describe the media's practice in covering cases of child abductions it's favoritism, which in this case is a more-plainly spoken synonym for racism.
Mitchell Owens was abducted from his home 19 years ago. He lived in Menlo Park, Calif., a middle class area near Oakland.
He was African-American.
The Mitchell Owens story is even more disturbing than Elizabeth Smart's because his mother was beaten unconscious by the man who broke into her home that night and was informed of her 4-year-old son's abduction two days later when she awoke in a hospital bed.
Can you imagine the frenzy that would have ensued if one of Elizabeth Smart's parents had been beaten unconscious?
Amy Angelo told me that every few years, on her son's birthday, Ora Owens holds a rally for her son Mitchell.
Owens' abduction case did get some attention at the local level and, in earlier years, turnouts for the rallies were strong.
"But every year, fewer and fewer people show up," observed Angelo.
This November, Mitchell Owens would have been 24.