"Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome"

This is so true:

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. -Socrates (469?-399 B.C.)
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Here's yet another story on the incredibly slanted media coverage on missing people. Not that we need to have this pointed out - we're all aware of the intense reporting on certain people and not others. But you'd never guess the scale of the problem from the media coverage, which chooses the occasional pretty girl to feature endlessly:

For 2006, 173,903 missing persons records were entered for adults (21 and older) into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database; 99,736 were men, and 74,167 were women.

Not to be too cynical, but I thought this summed it up nicely:

The Daily Show published the satirical "America: The Book," which contained a formula for receiving good coverage. This formula equates amount of media time with cuteness, skin color and the media savvy of the grieving parents.
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Missing People Face Disparity in Media Coverage
By Michele Chan Santos
Special to MSN.com

If you are kidnapped or missing, it helps to be the right race, age, social class and gender. Otherwise, don't expect the media to cover your story.

"Sex sells, kidnapping sells, but not every kidnapping is equal," says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Kelly Bennett, a case manager for the National Center for Missing Adults, agrees. "Unless it's a pretty girl ages 20 to 35, the media exposure is just not there," she says. The most highly profiled missing persons cases in recent years have fit into this category: Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Jessie Marie Davis, Natalee Holloway. All of these women were also white.
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Why do the media — and their audiences — care less about missing men than women? Clark thinks it's because there's a public perception that men can take care of themselves (even though a lot of the missing men might have been victims of foul play).

If a missing person is white, female, young, attractive and has an upper-middle-class background, media coverage of her case will be far more thorough than coverage of missing men, minorities or the elderly, Clark says. "This taps in to a sort of ancient fairy-tale mentality: the kidnapped princess, the damsel in distress."