Joy Reid seems to have forgotten she is the host of a national talk show.

On her show last week, Reid condemned the media for the continuous coverage of the Gabby Petito case. “The way this story captivated the nation has many wondering, why not the same media attention when people of color go missing?” Reid asked. “Well, the answer actually has a name: missing white woman syndrome,” she continued, referencing a term coined by journalist Gwen Ifill to describe the disproportionate media coverage missing persons cases receive when the victim is white and female.

Petito is the 22-year-old woman who went missing on a cross-country road trip with her fiancé. Her slain body was recently found two weeks after she was reported missing. She is also white.

Sensationalist media coverage of missing white women like Gabby Petito, Laci Peterson, and Natalee Holloway has been the subject of scrutiny for the better part of two decades and has informed the cultural lexicon. Anyone familiar with Patrice O’Neal’s standup recalls his hysterical mock serenade to “Nataleeeee…Hollowaaayyy….That Aaangell!” and his advice to black people to chain yourself to a white baby if you ever go out sailing to make sure the Coast Guard continues to search for you if you go missing. O’Neal joked that you can judge how pretty a white woman is by estimating how long people would search for her if she disappeared. “High level white women,” he said matter-of-factly, generate the most media attention.

It’s true that white women and children tend to dominate the media coverage of missing persons cases. A 2016 study by Northwestern University sociologist Zach Sommers examined coverage throughout 2013 in four online media sources: the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and CNN.com. Sommers then cross-referenced the coverage with the FBI’s national database of missing persons. He found that news coverage did skew disproportionately towards cases where the missing person was a white woman. And women overall were significantly more likely to receive coverage than men and boys.

Undoubtedly, race plays a role in the cases that command national attention, along with other factors such as age, attractiveness, class, and the perceived “innocence” of the victim. Throughout our country’s perverse racial history, white women have been held up on a pedestal in the cultural imagination. The media, who are ultimately interested in generating ratings and revenue, unsurprisingly fall back on the tried and true marketing power of a pretty white damsel in distress. There are scores of missing black women who fit the same criteria of youth, attractiveness, and perceived virtue that should rightly garner the same degree of news coverage and yet do not.

Let’s be clear: the amount of news coverage devoted to any particular case does not confer any greater degree of human worth to that person. If the media were only concerned with recognizing the value of each person, they could simply run a daily scrolling list of the names of all the hundreds of thousands of people who go missing every year. But there are other factors that determine newsworthiness. Although sixty percent of all missing persons are white, we still only know the names offhand of two or three.

Often there are sensational elements to those cases that draw national attention. Gabby Petito was an aspiring social media influencer. She video blogged her entire road trip, providing ample video footage for media consumption. Video footage emerged of the couple’s bizarre and emotional encounter with Utah police a couple weeks before she was reported missing. The police were responding to a domestic dispute between the couple. Her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, was covered in visible lacerations on his face. Petito admitted to striking him and trying to grab the steering wheel while he was driving. Her body has since been recovered in Wyoming and there is currently a manhunt for Laundrie, who is wanted as a suspect in her death. The case is a made for TV melodrama.

On the other hand, the Black and Missing Foundation, which Reid featured during her segment, acknowledges multiple factors that contribute to the disparity in reporting on black and Latino missing persons. The primary reason is that a significant number of black missing children are runaways, in foster care, or homeless. Runaways simply do not generate the same level of national media attention. In 2017, a media panic over a surge in missing black and Latino girls in DC proved to be exaggerated when many of cases turned out to have already been resolved.

Abductions by family members, for instance in custody disputes, also don’t receive as much coverage. The recent tragedy of Aleyah and Royal McIntyre, two little black girls murdered by their mother, has received only scant coverage primarily in local outlets and through fathers’ rights advocacy groups. Aleyah’s mother had abducted her from the girl’s father, who had legal custody and had been fighting for years to have his daughter returned to him.

Joy Reid has yet to cover that story and many others like it.

Yes, that same Joy Reid who complained about the media’s obsession with missing white women, seems to have forgotten that she has a platform to draw attention to stories involving black victims if she so chooses. Isn’t that the much-ballyhooed purpose of intersectional representation? To provide a platform for voices that might otherwise not be heard? Why isn’t Reid using her voice to amplify the cases of missing black women for whom she feigns so much concern?

The Washington Examiner pointed out that Reid spends far more time reporting on hate crime hoaxes like Jussie Smollett’s staged attack or the infamous NASCAR noose that turned out to be a garage door pulley. Reid has also invested her energy in championing the cause of celebrated white women like Christine Blasey Ford, whose sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh proved suspect when her only corroborating witness accused her of making up the story. And just this week, Reid devoted air time to pushing the debunked accusation that border patrol agents were beating Haitian migrants with “whips” from the “slave era.”

Reid and every other major media outlet have also provided enormously disproportionate coverage of unarmed black people who have been killed by police. In 2020, there were 540,000 people who went missing and only 18 unarmed black victims of police shootings. And yet the average American could probably name far more black people shot by police than missing white women. Disparities often run both ways.

Disturbingly, while Reid spends an inordinate amount of air time on these incidents, she wholesale neglects the far more numerous black victims of homicide. Black Americans make up more than 50% of murder victims despite comprising only 13% of the population. An alarming number of those victims are innocent children. Did Reid devote any episodes of her show to Secoriea Turner, the 7-year-old killed during BLM’s armed takeover of a Wendy’s parking lot in Atlanta? Or to Horace Lorenzo Anderson, the 19-year-old murdered in the Seattle CHOP zone? Or to 4-year-old Mychal Moultry Jr., randomly shot in the head this month in Chicago? Or to 18-year-old Peter Boikai, murdered on Christmas morning in Baltimore?

No, she hasn’t. Nor has she devoted any time to black missing persons cases except as a prop for her grandstanding outrage over the coverage of Petito and other white women. She brings up the case of missing black geologist Daniel Robinson, who vanished suspiciously in Grand Teton National Park in June, but she doesn’t mention the two other white men, Robert Lowery and Cian McLaughlin, who also went missing in or near the national park this summer and who likewise did not capture the same level of media attention as Petito. This likely has more to do with the sex of the missing persons, all of whom are men, and the lack of those salacious details that make Petito’s case easier to drive ratings.

Will Reid continue to bring attention to Robinson’s disappearance, beyond using him to advance her own political agenda? Doubtful. It’s also ironic that Robinson happens to be a geologist, given that scientific journal Nature Communications recently condemned the geosciences as rooted in white supremacy because they claimed that black people are too afraid of holding rock hammers to study geology. (I’m not making this up, it really happened.)

It’s obvious that this ersatz concern is merely one more instance of left-wing propaganda being used to drive racial division between Americans. Reid has a platform to highlight the cases of missing people of color. She chooses instead to focus on the coverage of white women.