Missing Women, Missing News

In a country with comparatively little violent crime, murders usually generate a flurry of media attention and police action, but this was not the case for the sixty women who were murdered or went missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1978 and 2002. When police charged Robert Pickton in 2002, the media suggested that these long years of inaction and silence were the result of individual incompetence and bureaucratic failure. In Missing Women, Missing News, David Hugill argues that these explanations only scratch the surface. Through a critical analysis of the print coverage of the Pickton trial, Hugill demonstrates how news narratives reproduce a dominant "commonsense" framework that rationalizes the victimization of people on the margins. He argues that while journalists exposed the failure and incompetence of a few individuals within the police force and the state, they did little to reveal the disturbing socio-political context that made it possible for these murders to continue unabated for so many years. In this insightful critique Hugill shows how the mainstream press squandered the opportunity to examine the continued workings of colonialism, racism and patriarchy in Canadian society. Book jacket.