Michael Smerconish: THE 'MISSING' INGREDIENT

2.21.08

Philadelphia Daily News

ON TUESDAY, Ardmore bakery owner Richard Petrone Sr. marked the third anniversary of the night his son disappeared after leaving a South Street bar.

On Feb. 19, 2005, Richard Petrone Jr., 35, and girlfriend Danielle Imbo, 34, left Abilene's shortly before midnight in Petrone's 2001 Dodge Dakota. Then they vanished. So did the truck. There was no evidence of robbery, nor have their credit cards and cell phones been used. And now the case has been classified as a murder-for-hire.

You'd think that the reclassification, along with the anniversary, would put the case back in the news. It did - for a day.

But this remarkable disappearance has again receded from the headlines, leaving a case like Natalee Holloway's to dominate the missing-persons news cycle. Even before the video of Joran van der Sloot's potentially incriminating statements garnered international attention over recent weeks, the Holloway case was covered regardless of any new developments.

Consider: On the eve of the anniversary of the Petrone-Imbo disappearance, I googled "Natalee Holloway" and generated 1,480,000 hits. For "Richard Petrone," I came up with only 1,660. Danielle Imbo - 937.

Why the discrepancy? After all, both cases presumably involve suspicious deaths and young victims. Each has details worthy of a dime novel. One includes not only a missing couple, but also a 5,000-pound truck.

Yet there's no comparison between the attention paid to Petrone-Imbo and that paid to Natalee Holloway. Or Laci Peterson. Or Chandra Levy.

My hunch is that the Petrone-Imbo disappearance would get even less coverage had they been a minority couple. Or the disappearance of a single white male.

The case of Jamie Cockayne, a Bucks County native who was murdered last year on St. John in the Virgin Islands, also failed to ignite the media firestorm of other cases. It wasn't until more than two months after Jamie's murder, when his family hired a private investigator to solve a case the local police apparently couldn't, that the Cockaynes got significant media coverage. (Current Google count: 1,330.)

The gap is even bigger when we talk TV coverage. The Holloway case has been a constant since her disappearance. Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren and the cable world have never let go. The Petrone-Imbo case has received a fraction of the attention.

It would be easy to condemn the ad media for the disparity. But it's not the real explanation. The one thing we know is that TV execs will air anything Americans will watch.

The process is bottom up. They give us what the numbers say we want. And the numbers prove that we have a healthy appetite for damsels in distress. Petite, white damsels-next-door. The blonder the better.

I learned this firsthand on the eve of Super Tuesday, when I guest-hosted Glenn Beck's TV program on "CNN Headline News."

Ninety percent of the program was devoted to politics. The next day, I was anxious to review the ratings in the hope that I'd held Beck's audience and would be invited back. (Thankfully, I had.)

But as I ran my finger across the column of that night's ratings, something jumped off the page - Nancy Grace's numbers. They were the highest since her show launched three years ago. She beat Keith Olbermann and Lou Dobbs. Bill O'Reilly won the time slot as he usually does, but his margin over Grace was much less than any other night.

Why? Because Nancy Grace didn't talk about politics. She talked about Natalee Holloway.

You could argue that because the rest of the television world covered the election, Grace filled a void by airing the Holloway story, and had it to herself.

But I think that's only part of the answer. The more complete analysis is simply that Americans would rather watch a story about a missing attractive blond female than presidential politics - even on election eve.

Too bad there isn't an equal appetite for information about Rich Petrone and Danielle Imbo. *

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.mastalk.com.