I sincerely hope that Nancy Guthrie is found soon and that she is in good health. Whatever the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, it is a frightening ordeal for any family to endure, and my sympathies are with them. No family deserves that kind of anguish.

That said, the situation raises uncomfortable questions about how modern news is prioritized and presented.

As has been widely reported, the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie has allegedly gone missing in Tucson, Arizona under suspicious circumstances. At the time of this writing, no suspects or persons of interest have been publicly identified, though that may well have changed by the time this piece is read.

What stands out is not merely the seriousness of the case, but the extraordinary volume and intensity of national media coverage devoted to it.

FOX News, my primary source of news, has devoted seemingly nonstop attention to the story, cycling through law enforcement officials, former agents, psychologists, and assorted “experts,” often repeating the same limited information hour after hour. When The Story with Martha MacCallum ended, FOX rolled directly into The Will Cain Show, which picked up precisely where it left off, once again displaying the same grainy black-and-white image of a man in a stocking cap at the Guthrie residence, with little new information added. I went out for a walk and when I came back, the Guthrie story was still being played on Will Cain.

Switching channels offered no relief. CNN appeared to be doing much the same. The repetition was relentless.

Now comes word that federal authorities are offering a $50,000 reward—funded by taxpayer dollars—for information. That decision may be well-intentioned, and some may find it appropriate. Others, myself included, are less convinced. Regardless, it raises an uncomfortable but unavoidable question, one worth asking plainly if we are to be honest with ourselves.

With all due respect to the Guthrie family, does anyone seriously believe this level of national attention—or the scale of public resources and airtime devoted to it—would be applied if the missing person were my mother? Or yours?

This is not a question rooted in cruelty or indifference. It is a question about media hierarchy and influence. What makes this case so exceptional? Is it the crime itself—or the proximity of the victim to celebrity and institutional power?

I do not know Ms. Guthrie personally, and I am only marginally familiar with her daughter’s work. My strongest recollection of Savannah Guthrie is her 2020 interview with President Trump, which struck me as aggressively one-sided and emblematic of what I see as a broader ideological posture within mainstream media. That perception may be fair or unfair, but it is widely held and undoubtedly shapes how many viewers interpret this wall-to-wall coverage.

Meanwhile, no shortage of other consequential stories appear to have been pushed aside. Questions surrounding Epstein’s associates continue to stall. Gold and silver prices are rising sharply, suggesting deeper economic tremors worthy of serious discussion. Massive fraud involving Somali nonprofit networks in Minnesota has largely faded from headlines. Even the war between Ukraine and Russia—once treated as an existential global crisis—barely registers now.

Are we really to believe that none of this merits comparable attention?

Even if Ms. Guthrie has been found by the time you read this, that outcome does not excuse the media’s turn toward salacious, ratings-driven programming.

The larger issue is not this case in isolation, but what it reveals about how the media gauges our interests—or perhaps how little confidence it has in them. Endless repetition of the same visuals and speculation, absent new facts, feels less like journalism and more like content filler. It suggests a belief that viewers are best served by emotional fixation rather than substantive information.

That, more than anything, is the sad commentary.

If the media truly respected its audience, it would trust us to follow multiple complex stories at once. It would inform rather than mesmerize. And it would resist the temptation to elevate one tragic event—however sympathetic—into a national obsession simply because it is familiar, marketable, or connected to one of their own.