WHERE IS TAMIKA HUSTON?

Where is Tamika Huston? She’s been missing from her home in Spartanburg, SC for months, but Oct. 23 was the first time I heard about it. If she’s missing, why don’t I see her name on television every night like I see the names of Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking, Chandra Levy, Brooke Wilberger or Dru Sjodin? I can’t distinguish any significant differences in the women. The only one that is obvious is on the surface. Skin color. Tamika Huston is African-American.

Some might blame Tamika’s exclusion on a heavy news cycle when she went missing in late May or early June, but that doesn’t excuse the media’s neglect in not carrying her case since then.

The frustration level rises when you learn that Tamika’s aunt is a public relations executive and has made a Herculean effort to get her niece’s story to major media outlets with few results.

This young woman's story is heartbreaking, but what is even more compelling is that she is not the only one. Each year, hundreds of thousands of adults and juveniles are reported as missing and very few receive major media coverage.

I’m not suggesting that these women didn’t deserve to have their stories told. What I am suggesting is that they ALL deserve to have their stories told. The problem is there are so many stories and only so much coverage available. So, that logically leads to my second suggestion - that the media should focus on cases that they can actively aid in solving, not cases where the sole criteria appears to be that the missing person is young, white, female, middle to upper class, and therefore newsworthy. Let’s focus on helping and not participating in morbid voyeurism. There’s very little someone on the East Coast can do to help in a missing person’s case that occurred on the West Coast, but I’ll bet there is a lot of help that could be generated by regional media working together to saturate markets that are adjacent to areas where there are active missing persons cases.