Gabby Petito and the I Can’t Help But Think Pieces
When it comes to accountability for media bias, journalists and commentators should begin with themselves.
These days when a tragedy strikes and makes its way through the national media, we are treated to a familiar cycle. First the news breaks, generating shock and sadness. Then it gets further developed, with more journalists joining in with new angles and in-depth reporting. Finally it enters the national consciousness, and pleas of solidarity with the victims appear across social media. Profile pictures are updated, emojis are added to Twitter bios, and your friend’s Instagram stories become walls of text.
Then we arrive at a fourth phase. The ‘I can’t help but think’ phase. Where suddenly everyone — though typically the same people from before — don their media criticism hats, and declare that expressing strong solidarity has crossed into problematic territory. How has this tragedy been given so much attention, they ask, when I can’t help but think of this similar one that got none?
The nuances that differentiate these events are ignored. Recollections of past coverage evaporates (‘no one talked’ about this thing that was widely talked about at the time), and the vast and diverse global media industry is shrunk down into simply ‘the media,’ meaning Western media. Most important of all, those making these complaints espouse a moral standard that, upon scrutiny, they haven’t been upholding themselves.
The underlying thesis is always the same: the media ignored the previous case because the victims were not privileged like the current ones are, and so their stories never achieved escape velocity.
Once this new narrative appears it can crowd out all other discussion. The names and lives of the victims become secondary as they’re caught in the gravitational pull of the culture war, where all that matters is what identities they occupied, and where they lay in the nexus of privileged and marginalized, oppressor and oppressed. There’s always something, somewhere, that should have merited our attention, and so there is always an event to point to in the attempt to deflate the outrage about the current one.
This is not to suggest that there are no good I Can’t Help But Think pieces. On the contrary, they can play an important role in moderating our conversations, and there’s truth to all of them. Yet they are the ultimate exemplifications of good or bad faith arguments, and frequently become examples of journalistic bad faith. They can be lessons or sermons. They can cynically shame you in your moment of grief, or offer you a genuine teachable moment.
This brings us to the Gabby Petito coverage. The story is undeniably sad, in which a travel blogger with a relatively large following was murdered by her (yet to be formally accused) fiancé. It involves several hot button issues like violence against women, spousal abuse and poor police conduct. Yet there’s also a noticeable scale to it. An immense level of coverage devoted to a single missing person.
Those narratives have given way to the argument that the death of a young white woman like Petito has been given undue attention relative to the many other non-white women who have gone missing in the same area for so long. The murder of Petito, writes Molly Jong-Fast in The Daily Beast, reveals the ‘outsized attention’ women like her get relative to the 710 missing Indigenous women who have also gone missing in that same state. Charles M. Blow offered a similar I Can’t Help But Think piece on the New York Times on this contrast.
I don’t disagree with Jong-Fast or Blow. This bias is a well known phenomenon, and has even been coined, by news anchor Gwen Ifill, as Missing White Woman Syndrome. There’s no denying that it exists, or that it’s at play with the Petito case.
Yet, how many articles has the Daily Beast ever published on the missing Indigenous women in Wyoming? Or anywhere in the United States? As of writing this, none. Besides a single article on the different case of missing Indigenous women in Canada, the topic has never been reported on there before. How many times has Jong-Fast published an article about it before this week? As far as I can tell, never. Blow has also, again as far as I can see, never written or tweeted about missing Indigenous women.
With this in mind, both Jong-Fast and Blow’s articles come across as weaponizing the deaths of both Petito and the missing Indigenous women. They’re there to pull these victims into the writer’s own culture war battles. They’re there to shame us, not teach us.
It might seem unfair to single out individual journalists. They’re busy people and have their own beats. Yet Jong-Fast and Blow both have significant platforms, and both are enamored and outraged by this ‘lack of coverage’ that they, as high profile journalists, have had ample opportunity to shed light on themselves. Until this moment, they have not. Who then are they to tell us our attention has been in the wrong place when their job is to give coverage to these stories? How can we trust that they feel so outraged, when they’ve never spoken about this before?
The culture war injection goes beyond the deaths of individuals. In the days after the Notre Dame fire in 2019, many writers were outraged that the event had generated so much more media attention and supporting donations than a similar fire from a year prior at Brazil’s Museau Nacional. A cultural landmark of equal importance, yet not equivalent coverage? How could that be? Is it perhaps because we unfairly value Western landmarks over non-Western ones?
Yet the contradiction is obvious. You’ll be hard pressed to find a writer of a Notre Dame fire I Can Help But Think piece that wrote about the Museau Nacional fire when it actually happened. This is how to tell if a piece lamenting disproportionate coverage is being made in good or bad faith. If these pieces look backwards into a void that the writers themselves should have filled, but didn’t, then the motivation for the article becomes clear. They’re culture war salvos.
Charles Blow’s piece on Gabby Petito even mentions the Notre Dame-Museau Nacional fire example. “If your heart was broken,” he laments, “when the Notre-Dame cathedral burned but you were not moved — or possibly even aware — when a fire razed the oldest science museum in Brazil” then you are exhibiting a gross bias.
Yet a review of Blow’s own published work and historical Twitter feed reveals no mention of the Museau Nacional fire until over a year after the fire. In fact, on the day Notre Dame burned down, he was so shocked that he had to ask Twitter to put it into historical perspective, because he couldn’t think of any equivalent examples. He had, as far as his Twitter account suggests, never even heard of the Museau Nacional fire until Notre Dame burned.
Again, only a few years later, Blow would write a piece shaming people who ‘weren’t moved’ by the Brazilian fire when it happened, but were outraged by the Parisian one. The hypocrisy is obvious, and it deflates Blow’s point.
So what does this all mean? The problem of media bias falls primarily on journalists whose job it is to tell stories, less so the viewing public. And when the claim of bias is made, there must be accountability on behalf of the speaker.
What should we do about our biases? Untangle them. Unpack them. Start over, Blow says. Journalists can begin with themselves.
