Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Pretty young victims garner the most public interest
In the thriller film Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, plays a sociopath newbie video news collector who abandons both ethics and decency for the lead story on television broadcasts.
In a pivotal scene, Renee Russo, who plays Nina Romina, a news director and impending Bloom boss, schools her understudy on the news value entities of blood, crime and murder.
“We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs,” Russo explains.
Romina expands her web with this socioeconomic aspect.
“What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and/or white, injured at the hands of the poor, or a minority.”
“The best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”
No flinch exists in Romina as she delivers her if “it bleeds it leads” tonic and Bloom gulps the insidious Kool-Aid, tumbling further into his immoral obsession that eventually includes repositioning bodies in crime scenes and withholding evidence that could help police investigations.
Of course, the Romina visualized victim must include tussled blond hair while the imagery impacts even more indelibly if blood drops spill into her endowed cleavage as she exiles on Main St.
Welcome to the U.S.A. where social interests peak when crime invades suburbia and urban crime gets presented as natural occurrences like Earth’s rain, wind and fire.
The Romina mindset surfaced last week as Hamilton Twp. police and Mercer County law enforcement officers investigated the murder of suburban resident Jessica Prusik.
Nothing sells newspapers or garners tumultuous website attention faster than a dead Caucasian woman found tucked away inside a pastoral suburban park.
“And she’s pretty, too,” offered a coworker after accessing Prusik’s Facebook page.
His insights were stopped before heading down that lonesome necrophilia road where sanctity of life loses to insanity. However, our society enjoys a good dead body story.
Prusik, 38, and married mother, became the second Hamilton Twp. woman involved in mystery during the month of September.
The first, Christine Rosie, 44, disappeared early last month and her gone-girl status caused the typical responses associated with white suburban women disappearing in broad daylight.
Inquiries ramped after Rosie’s car had been found idling near a wooded area off Kuser Road.
Days later, police found Rosie alive but dehydrated in nearby woods.
Twenty-four hours earlier national television news hound Nancy Grace had trolled metropolitan Trenton news rooms to find reporters to discuss the missing Rosie.
Grace, a legal commentator, television journalist and former prosecutor, frequently discusses victims’ rights and loves stories about missing U.S. Caucasian suburban women.
Her focus contributes to this country’s attraction to fatal incidents that involve crimes perpetrated against non-minority class of females.
Grace will put out feelers about Prusik if law enforcement officers do not make an immediate arrest.
Considering information being discussed in print and in some public circles, police have a likely suspect.
Still, watching the media response to missing white women causes mental anguish.
Television news reporter Gwen Ifil is credited with the coined phrase “missing white woman syndrome” which identifies our national media’s extensive coverage of cases that involve the disappearance or harming of white, upper-class and middleclass women.
Certainly more coverage follows blonde women and public attention skyrockets when the missing person ranks as young and attractive.
The coverage is disproportionate, especially when one considers that more than 90,000 people go missing annually in the U.S., according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
More than 40,000 of those unaccounted for are female from all walks of life.
Our country’s fascination affixes with notable missing women such as Natalie Holloway, the quintessential queen bee of all missing persons.
Metropolitan Trenton delivers a similar attitude.
Local residents remember Megan Kanka, a sevenyear-old, raped and murdered by her neighbor Jesse Timmendequas in Hamilton in 1994.
And we know Kristin Huggins, an aspiring artist carjacked, raped and murdered by maggot Ambrose Harris in Trenton in 1992.
Sure, their existences were important but the lives of African-American soul sisters, Asian girls, and Latino women matter, too.
L.A. Parker is a Trentonian columnist. Reach him at laparker@trentonian.com. Twitter@ laparker6.