“Ratings were actually pretty decent at this point, due to a resurgence in a type of story that we began referring to as 'MPWW'--Missing Pretty White Women. ...

”Fox has an entire department devoted to doing nothing but crunching the ratings data ... And what the ratings told us in early 2006 was that viewers were just not interested in any missing women who weren't young, pretty, and white.

“'It's racism, pure and simple,' Amy, one of the bookers, posited on a Wednesday morning as we all looked at the previous weekend's ratings. We'd done three segments on Natalee [Holloway], followed by one on a missing black girl, and the numbers had plumeted when we made the switch.”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pp. 146-149.