Gabby Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, went on a cross-country road trip in early July, and then went missing a week later. Her body was found in a national park a few days later, and her death has been ruled a homicide. Why has this case made national headlines while other missing persons and murder victims are relegated to the local news, if they get any coverage at all?
00:00:00.000Today on The Matt Walsh Show, some in the news media are claiming that the Gabby Petito case is only getting all of this attention because she's a white woman.
00:00:07.600They say that black men and women who are killed or go missing are often ignored, and they're actually right about that, but not for the reason they think.
00:00:13.360We'll discuss the real reason today behind this disparity.
00:00:16.240Also, Kamala Harris condemns Border Patrol agents for using whips on Haitian immigrants, even though Border Patrol agents did not use whips on Haitian immigrants.
00:00:23.900And BTS performs for the U.N. General Assembly, providing yet another reason to abolish the U.N.,
00:00:28.480plus 500 female sports stars come out in support of abortion rights.
00:00:31.980I didn't even know there were 500 female sports stars.
00:00:34.540And our daily cancellation will deal with the increasing trend of teachers coming out to their students during class.
00:00:40.100All of that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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00:02:03.340You know, I've never paid much attention to high-profile murder cases.
00:02:07.020Around 40 people are murdered in this country every single day.
00:02:09.720All of these are sad situations, some sadder than others perhaps, but the media wants us to be especially concerned about certain cases and not others.
00:02:18.500I don't feel obligated to follow their lead on that point or on any other point, frankly.
00:02:23.120That's why I haven't followed the Gabby Petito case very closely.
00:02:28.140And for those who have been similarly out of the loop, just a quick summary.
00:02:31.900Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, set out on a cross-country road trip back in early July.
00:02:36.480They documented their adventures on Instagram and YouTube.
00:02:40.540Petito made her last Instagram post on August 25th.
00:02:43.660A week later, Laundrie returned home alone with no explanation as to Gabby's whereabouts.
00:02:48.600Several days after that, he went missing as well.
00:02:51.480He was possibly captured on a deer camera footage earlier this week, trekking through the woods of northwest Florida.
00:02:57.020Meanwhile, the body, recovered in a Wyoming national park a few days ago, has now been officially identified as Gabby Petito.
00:03:02.760Her death has been ruled a homicide, unsurprisingly.
00:03:05.280Why has this case made national headlines while other missing persons and murder victims are relegated to the local news, if they get any coverage at all?
00:03:14.460It's not very hard to discern an answer to that.
00:03:17.360Gabby Petito already had a base of followers on social media who were interested in her life.
00:03:22.180It makes sense that they would be likewise interested in the circumstances of her death.
00:03:26.240She was young, attractive, photogenic.
00:03:28.860The disappearance out in the wilderness, the fiance on the run, the additional details emerging like puzzle pieces.
00:03:33.820Because all of these factors make for a more sensational story.
00:03:38.140They don't make her death more terrible than anybody else's death.
00:03:41.360They didn't make her life more valuable or its taking more tragic.
00:03:44.480But they do add up to a compelling narrative.
00:03:47.500And it may sound crude to refer to a real-life murder case in that way as a compelling narrative.
00:04:10.760And this is part of the reason why the national media selects and amplifies certain murders and not others.
00:04:17.340Though recently, prominent members of the national media itself have pointed to a different explanation.
00:04:23.280Joy Reid of MSNBC echoed the claims made by many on the left when she pegged the Gabby Petito coverage as another instance of, quote-unquote, missing white woman syndrome.
00:04:34.440Reid, having never encountered a story that she won't racialize, argues that the media and the public only care about white people, white women specifically, who go missing or turn up dead.
00:04:44.120And she charges the media with, quote, ignoring cases involving missing people of color.
00:04:50.880But the way this story has captivated the nation has many wondering, why not the same media attention when people of color go missing?
00:04:57.820Well, the answer actually has a name, missing white woman syndrome.
00:05:02.300The term coined by the late and great Gwen Ifill to describe the media and public fascination with missing white women like Lacey Peterson or Natalie Holloway, while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.
00:05:16.680We have been sounding the alarm for nearly 14 years because of this.
00:05:21.860When it comes to missing persons of color, men, women, and children, our cases are not taken seriously.
00:05:28.460And no one is looking for us if we were to go missing.
00:05:31.080Now, if we're going this route, I could just as easily chalk it up to sexism.
00:05:36.960When's the last time that a missing or dead white man made the national headlines?
00:05:42.540And if anti-black racism lies at the heart of this, then why do white female alleged murderers tend to captivate the public even more than the murder victims?
00:06:31.680So you might know about it if you listen to this show, but you won't know about this case if you trust the mainstream media for your news coverage.
00:06:37.280Two years ago, a black woman named Brittany Hill was shot and killed by Chicago gang members in broad daylight while holding her one-year-old daughter in her arms.
00:06:46.820The footage captured by security cameras is haunting.
00:06:51.680On the surface, the crime seems to contain all of the elements that would attract widespread media coverage.
00:06:58.620You have a young woman shot dead in the street.
00:07:02.700She dies while laying on top of her child to shield her from the bullets.
00:07:07.720It's a devastating story and a dramatic story.
00:07:11.400There are many such stories in Chicago and other cities around the country, but this one is on film.
00:07:16.520And even in a place like Chicago, it's not every day that a young woman is executed in the middle of the afternoon while holding a baby in her arms.
00:07:23.740So why didn't the national media show any interest in that event?
00:07:28.480Why didn't Joy Reid ever mention Brittany Hill's name?
00:07:31.180The very media that condemns us for allegedly ignoring black deaths is itself guilty of ignoring those same deaths.
00:07:39.760Indeed, it's entirely their fault that the deaths are ignored.
00:07:43.480They're the ones who are supposed to be calling attention to news stories.
00:07:48.020That's their whole job, and they're not doing it.
00:07:50.640Joy Reid has her own show on MSNBC, a national platform.
00:07:53.800She could have single-handedly made Brittany Hill a household name, and yet she ignored her death entirely.