MSNBC and Dateline Hosts Discuss Why Gabby Petito Story Went Viral: ‘Pretty White Women Missing’
MSNBC host Chris Jansing and Dateline co-host Keith Morrison debated on Thursday why the story over Gabby Petito, who went missing and whose body has since been found, went viral, with the Jansing and Morrison citing “pretty white women” as a reason.
“You’ve done a lot of stories like this, but every once in a while one catches fire online and in the public imagination,” Jansing told Morrison during MSNBC Reports.
“It’s amazing. I continue to be, you know, kind of uncertain as to why. Why that one as opposed to some other one,” said Morrison. “There’s usually some very ancient story, I think, that gets our guts going with a story like this. And it immediately – I’’s like a weather system that suddenly existed everywhere in the country. Everybody knows about it.”
“You know, I mean, obviously, there’s a whole question, which we don’t – it’s not for us to get into,” said Jansing. “But we’ve talked a lot about it here on MSNBC, and that is, it’s a lot of pretty white women.”
“Pretty white women missing,” said Morrison in agreement.
“For sure,” said Jansing.
“There’s also video because she was doing this online travel blog,” she added.
As pictures of the search for Petito were being shown, Morrison remarked that “every story” Dateline, the 30th season of which premieres Friday, “does is intense and it’s always complicated and it always has scenes like the one you’re seeing there. They just aren’t normally followed by the press from around the world.”
Jansing asked if people online “help or hurt” the case.
“On one hand, they’ve been apparently providing some information,” she said. “On the other hand, I read in one of the articles, that the vast majority of these clues turn out to be absolutely nothing and it’s a wild goose chase.”
Morrison concurred and added that “it just adds exponentially to the work the police have to do.”
“There are some situations in which groups of internet sleuths will actually organize themselves in such a way that they can work with a particular police department to solve a particular crime, quite often a cold case, it may go back 30, 40, 50 years even, using familial DNA, that sort of thing,” he said.
“Because their real skills to get on their computer and look for connections between, you know, a missing person and somebody, you know, several generations removed from that missing person, and if they can manage to put those things together, they can come up with a solution,” continued Morrison. “It’s a complicated business, but the detectives these days, quite a few of them, are sitting back and saying, ‘Okay, You go. Try to get that and let me know what you find out.’ It has been helping. Some cases have been solved that way. But just a few so far.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
