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Media Stumped On How To Handle Missing Mixed-Race Woman

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WASHINGTON—Struggling to find an appropriate response to a delicate situation, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they remained stumped on how exactly to handle the case of missing mixed-race woman Alison Johnston. “On the one hand, she’s fairly light-skinned, but on the other, she actually has a black parent, so we’re really at a loss about what to do here,” said USA Today deputy editor Bob Roe, adding that it was entirely up in the air whether to cover the biracial 21-year-old’s abduction as a heartbreaking tragedy worthy of national coverage or a run-of-the-mill disappearance deserving a single 200-word brief. “I mean, it’s tough, because if she were 100 percent black, we’d obviously just bury her way back on E6. There definitely wouldn’t be talk about using her on the front page, you know? But this half-white situation is really making us second-guess everything.” Roe went on to say that, in the end, Johnston would probably be young and attractive enough to put her over the top.