All posts by Lilli Morgan

Lilli Morgan has studied Communications at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She currently works both front and back of house at a local vegan restaurant in the North Shore of Chattanooga, and in the summertime, finds joy in being a whitewater raft guide on the Ocoee River in Polk County, Tennessee. Lilli enjoys creating content and visual storytelling and has recently started managing the social media for her rafting outpost. Lilli’s specialties include critical thinking, teamwork, time management, networking, and public speaking.
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The Issue Within the ‘Missing White Woman’ – by Lilli Morgan

In August of 2021, “Twenty-two year old female missing in Wyoming” was a news headline that scoured the media. Two years later, the name “Gabby Petito” still makes headlines from time to time. What exactly was it that made this story captivate an audience of millions? Was it because she and her spouse had a YouTube channel, they posted vlogs to? Was it because Gabby was a young, white, conventionally attractive female? Regardless of what the reasoning may be, her story perfectly aligns with what is commonly known as ‘missing white woman syndrome’. Missing White Woman Syndrome refers to the media’s infatuation with covering missing white women and its failure to cover identical stories about women of color. A question that may be commonly asked when analyzing Gabby Petitos story is, would this story be as popular if Gabby was not white?

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