The Washington Post Outlook section (its opinion page that comes out Sunday) did an interesting story on the coverage of Caylee. The article can be found here. Meanwhile, the Afro did the same story and the article can be found here.
I was surprised to see this article in the Post. But it was very well done. For context, the Post writer was African American. The Post cited a similar story to Caylee where Aja, N’Kiah, Tatianna and Brittany were all black children and all were missing before it was discovered that their mother killed them. The Post went on to say that their story is relatively unknown. The post compares coverage and the results are staggering, a google search revealed that the case of those black children only had 26,000 hits, while Caylee had 73 million. There was a clear bias to give Caylee coverage. Caylee's family and supporters came from the middle class and had more wealth than that black family so they had more opportunity to create a media fire storm. But the News media isnt paid to report stories, so class should be thrown out as a variable, that just leaves...race.
The Afro cited the Anthony family as ordinary and missing many hallmarks of a captivating story. The only things that Caylee had were she was a young, cute little, white girl that was murdered. Aside from class, and gender, race was really the one variable that couldnt be ignored in the coverage.
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