Those in marginalized groups are often misrepresented by the media. One of the reasons as to why this issue arises is because they do not have the opportunity to speak out their side of the story. An example of a marginalized group is women. In this case, it will be from Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young’s article “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” and Maggie De Vries’ Missing Sarah. Considering that we live in a more patriarchal society, women are often disregarded and are sometimes forced to conform to what men believe is right.
Jiwani and Young’s scholarly article discusses how media represents missing and murdered women in society, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to be specific. Jiwani and Young then further explores the different groups that exist. Within the marginalized group of women, there are different groups that divide them. For instance, there is a divide between white women and the Aboriginal women. Within the white women, there is also a divide that separates the lower and upper class, showing the existing hierarchy that exists. The media only tells the stories of those “positioning in ‘respectable’ societal roles — as mothers, daughters, and sisters.” (pg 903), they do not bother digging too deep into the stories of the missing or murdered Aboriginal women despite people reporting them in. Women in the minority group are often not acknowledged. This shows how the general population in society are misinformed even though they feel like they are informed. The media decides which stories are told; this factor is quite scary, especially when thinking of what other stories are framed differently through leading words to make the audience have a certain perspective and thus leading to a bias?
Although feminists have already held uncountable protests regarding gender inequality, the conflict is still around. Jiwani and Young also points out how the media introduces the article when a marginalized person is biased so that the audience would lean towards a negative perspective. In their article, it is noticed how these marginalized women were often associated to be drug addicts and sex-workers. The media aims to increase its views by telling the sensational stories through the victims, only focusing on profiting from the story.
On the other side, Maggie de Vries’ memoir on her sister Sarah de Vries tells the story of Sarah’s life. Sarah was adopted to a white family and she was a mix of multiple races (de Vries, 1). The way the victims are represented to society differs depending on how well the author knows them. As seen for Jiwani and Young, the media do not know the victims personally so not much about their personal lives, or how the victims were prior to the lives the lead as sex-workers and drug addicts were told. de Vries, however, knew Sarah personally. Although Sarah also fell into the same lifestyle in being a sex-worker and drug-addict, de Vries told the story from a more well-rounded point of view.
Works Cited
De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss. Toronto: Penguin Group, 2008. Print.
Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917.