Despite the title, I don't think the real intent of the writer is to focus specifically on hair colour - it's about the concept of what we regard as 'ideal' children. The typical blonde haired blue eyed aryan children have been regarded as this penultimate symbol of childhood for so long that these kinds of stories hit to the very heart of the culture.

So no, they don't specifically have to be blonde to get so much attention - they have to be photogenic, and more importantly, they have to come from the strata of society that the most media consumers can empathise with.

This isn't localised on children or even kidnappers. For just a moment, consider the Schapelle Corby case. I found myself rather mystified by the sheer number of people declaring she was innocent. I felt a degree of sympathy for the harshness of the sentence for a pretty tame drug such as marijuana (the quantity was large, but I don't loathe marijuana dealers and smugglers as I do those involved in say, the heroin trade) but as for guilt or innocence, I didn't see any reason to think she was a special case.

In Corby's case, ask yourself if she'd been such a media sensation if she'd been black? To further prove my point that it's about societal empathy and how attractive they are, it doesn't have to be about race.

Lets say she was caucasian, but 30 kilos heavier and sporting visible tattoos on her neck.

Be honest. How many would have cared then?

Races favouring their own kind is an observable fact, so you would expect the media in a predominantly white society to favour the Ramsay cases:

"Researchers have found some people automatically produce stress hormones when they see someone of a different race."

"The two researchers argue that modern racial discrimination is an overstimulated response to what might be called an "alliance" detector in the human brain."

"That genotypes seek out maximally conducive environments is particularly well illustrated by findings that people select similar others with whom to associate, both as friends and as marriage partners...

...and where animals raised apart show a preference to interact with kin rather than non-kin (Holmes & Sherman, 1983)...

Following the death of a child, for example, both mothers and fathers irrespective of sex of child are found to grieve more for children resembling their side of the family than they do for children resembling their spouse's side (Littlefield & Rushton, 1986). It would appear that people are able to detect genetic similarity in others and act accordingly."

What is harder to fathom is why the media is reluctant to report racially motivated crimes against white men:

"Peter Fahy, the Chief Constable of Cheshire and a spokesman on race issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said it was a fact that it was harder to get the media interested where murder victims were young white men."

Go figure ...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97313840
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12795581
http://www.euvolution.com/articles/gensim01.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/22/ukcrime.race