Perhaps its the media's shortcoming in not writing of other missing children and the plight of the pain the family endure. If not a priority then perhaps they need to make it one. It seems that some of these cases have been there for a long time and the media loses interest after a while, because there is no further sensationalistic news to write to bring in the profits. No missing child should ever be about profit or selling news, i feel it is a media responsibility to keep those missing children's faces in their news articles at least once a week, so people don't forget these poor innocent children.
SBM
I referred earlier to my friend's best piece of investigative journalism (in her own eyes). It involved over 18 months, travelling many thousands of miles, many nights away from home, many meals eaten on the road, etc. She figures that her paper spent over a quarter of a million dollars on her salary, travel, etc, for that one single story.
That was back in the 80s, when newspapers were doing better than they are now. Even then, her paper couldn't afford to fund many stories like that because they just did not draw enough readership. She doubts that they even broke even on that one story, even though it was really big and really important.
Much of the MSM is in financial trouble these days. Fine old papers like the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with long histories of great reporting, have been forced to go to an online only format with a minimum of local reporters. Some have closed forever. Some have been bought out and have been converted to fluff journalism.
Assigning a responsibility without funding it is called an unfunded mandate in legislative terms. The local government entities who are actually charged with carrying out unfunded mandates hate them because the money has to come from somewhere.
Same thing is true of the media.
Most serious media outlets walk a line between serious reporting and providing enough fluff to keep their audiences and advertising revenues.
There are so many serious but complicated issues to report on and each outlet prioritises differently. In that, they are no different from any private individual. The vast majority of us cannot contribute money to every cause we think is worthy because we'd end up giving something like 15 cents per cause which would cost more than that in processing expenses, so we would actually end up hurting all those causes.
So one paper runs a "labour of love" story about disparities in education. Another runs a serious report on just where taxpayer's dollars are being spent. Another runs a report about the fate of seriously mentally ill people in a recession.
The thing all those stories have in common is that they don't draw public attention. Without public attention, the funding simply does not exist for many of those stories to be reported.
We, as the public, are literally getting the media reporting we pay for.