I raised a few eyebrows Friday when I decried the mainstream media’s obsession with missing Aruba teenager Natalee Holloway in my piece, “It’s time to end ‘Missing Pretty White Girl Watch’ and get back to real news.” I’m happy to say that others are wondering why this trumps the war and other more pressing matters.

(Confidential to Fox News, which is the “All Natalee, All the Time” standard bearer: The key to avoiding criticism of your journalism is not to abandon journalism altogether.)

BBC reporter Matthew Davis files “Missing teen case grips US media” from the Beeb’s bureau in Washington, in which he compares the coverage to “runaway nut case bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, Congressional intern Chandra Levy and other missing pretty women.

Since the teenager went missing after leaving a nightclub on 30 May her picture has stared out from newspapers, while TV bulletins have covered every movement in the story.

It is not hard to imagine cynical reasons why.

Natalee is young, pretty and white. A judge and his son are among five people held over her vanishing.

As much as the media needs another liberal outlet like Michael Jackson needs another nose job, for once I agree with Arianna Huffington in her latest column, “Just Say Noruba.” She pounds on the tired and incorrect meme that the Downing Street Memo is the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the Dead Sea Scrolls all rolled into one, but she echoes my feelings about this non-stop coverage of underage drinking gone wrong:

If you were to get your news only from television, you’d think the top issue facing our country right now is an 18-year-old girl named Natalee who went missing in Aruba.

Her advice? Do what I did when I made a promise to stop watching until the news returns to what in this world is important:

In any case, here’s my suggestion: go cold turkey. Just say no. Every time you see or hear the word “Aruba” or “Holloway” on the screen in the next few weeks, turn off the TV, or change the channel. I’ve been trying it — and it’s not easy (I’ve found the Cartoon Network is a pretty safe — if nerve rattling — escape valve).

National Review blogger Stephen Spruiell at his yet-unnamed blog also takes a jab at it at the end of an outstanding post on the MSM’s silence over Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley’s accusations of U.S. troops murdering journalists and her non-apology apology:

For good news from Iraq, it’s either the bloggers or Fox News — mostly the bloggers. Fox spends most of the day giving us fair and balanced coverage of the missing Aruba Teen. Right on. We can’t let the public lose faith in America’s existential struggle against the van der Sloots.

Spruiell links to a story highlighting that Greta Van Susteren’s highest-rated show this year was a dispatch from Aruba. Speaking of which, Rathergate reader Patrick decided to e-mail Greta and ask why Holloway merits hourly updates compared to the thousands who disappear each year:

Greta, you’re great at giving us the stories about how stories are covered. Here’s one I’d like to see.

Massive media attention has been focused on just a handful of missing women over the past few years, even though thousands of men and women disappear suddenly each year. How does one missing woman becomes a national figure, while thousands of others become only a statistic?

Of course, much of it must have to do with race and social status, with media jumping on stories about people who they believe their audience would identify with. But even among average, middle-class white women, surely there must be dozens of mysterious disappearances for every one that makes national headlines. Why?

Greta answered that she didn’t have an answer — she apparently is just “riding the wave” like everyone else:

patrick - i wish i knew how a particular story “catches on”…greta

The irrepressable Michelle Malkin wondered as much earlier this month and has a roundup of like-minded thinkers. I wonder what she thinks two weeks later with coverage just as intense:

Why do so many people seem to care so much? I’m very sorry for the Holloway family, but no more so than I am for the families of several missing children–of all races and backgrounds–in my own backyard.

Here at Rathergate, alert reader/blogger Craig Henry wonders if Aruba’s pleasant climate has anything to do with journalists’ eagerness to get on the ground and report from the tropical front lines. If any of you know of a MPWG case in Barrow, Alaska, let me know. I’ll forward news tips to the networks and we’ll find out.

I don’t know if Craig had Dru Sjodin in mind when he mentioned the Dakotas in January. Sjodin disappeared in November 2003 from her job at a mall in Grand Forks, N.D. Unlike the Holloway case of underage drinking in unfamiliar territory, Sjodin was minding her own business when she was allegedly abducted and murdered by a repeat sex offender. The media coverage was not nearly as intense, which is ironic considering the accused’s background and the whole debate about releasing convicted sex offenders into society.

Craig’s theory of North Dakota’s lack of palm trees, not to mention bone-chilling winter cold, is as good a theory as any I’ve heard.

For those of you who can’t get enough of Holloway’s saga and will be starving for the meaningless when it ends, don’t sweat it. I just heard that CNN’s Second Annual Summer of the Shark Attacks has begun.

UPDATE: Alert reader Roger links to an outstanding article in the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News, entitled “Not White Enough.” Read the story (this newspaper only asks for your zip code and year of birth) and ask yourself why the case of Tamika Huston isn’t dissected every 30 minutes on the news.

UPDATE 2: Newsday’s Verne Gay writes a silly column advising the lagging CNN to boost ratings by hiring Dan Rather. But even Gay can’t resist lampooning what passes for “news” these days:

And cable news? The current joke is that it has become Blondes Reporting on Missing Blondes.

UPDATE 3: Malkin notes in this post how blogs following the Holloway case have watched their numbers surge. She has a point — let’s find what makes this case so hypnotic to Americans, bottle it and pour it all over our immigration crisis and the war.

UPDATE 4: Brooke Gladstone and colleagues at “On the Media” have created a hilarious spoof that CNN, NBC, CNBC and MSNBC would be consolidating into the new network “WWWA”, or Where the White Women At. The network will constantly update the status on missing pretty white women.

UPDATE 5: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers.