The Madeleine McCann Case

I think most people I know were surprised at quite how much news coverage this has been generating. Certainly missing child cases have always had the power to be a massive draw but this one seemed to take on a life of its own. There have been a few mentions of so-called 'Missing White Woman Syndrome' on the web as a way of explaining this, but it seems little more than a convenient response. I would say it's more likely down to it not being a case of "There, but for the grace of God..." thanks to the apparent stupidity of the McCanns on the night of Madeleine's disappearance or death.

There is nothing people like better, it seems, than to read about tragedy, apart from maybe tragedy that they think could never happen to them. In Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore questions whether the continued coverage of violence in the U.S. media compared to the lighter nature of the Canadian media links to the greater violence in U.S. society. This may be so but I think the people get the news they want, and judging by the massive popularity of soap operas, whose stories tend to follow dark and depressing routes and newspapers that feature terrible things on the front page.

Of course, in the case of the McCanns people could obviously sympathise with parents who have lost a child (who wouldn't?) while at the same time feel secure in the knowledge that they'd never be so stupid as to leave their child alone at that age and in such circumstances. Interviews I've read since then imply that they already feel they were being more than a little stupid. I would think the media weren't entirely sure where the public would go on this one but it was clear early on that while the Internet might rumble about them being bad parents, 'The Public' were 100% behind them and were thinking only of finding the missing child.

The ensuing media circus was weird to watch, leaving me feeling somewhat as I did when the nation went to pot over the death of Diana. And as they were ferried around the world meeting one important person after another you began to feel people getting a little restless and wanting something to be done. The fact that it happened in Portugal was a bit of a gift for the tabloid media and the less intelligent of our compatriots: the Portuguese police are clearly not going to be good enough by virtue of being 'dagos' specifically and foreigners generally.

And now they've accused the McCanns with DNA evidence the media seems to be getting concerned they're going to back the wrong horse. There has been some careful fence-sitting prose on offer, headlines that scream out that the McCanns have murdered their own daughter with story text explaining this is what those dirty foreigners are saying and the paper is not convinced. Murdoch's newspapers seem to have a special list talking about the evidence and casting doubt on what's been said where they can, no matter how stupid it looks, e.g. their comments that the smell of death on her bible was caused by her being a doctor and often in contact with the dead, while constantly reading the bible. The accusation has of course allowed the section of the population who 'always knew' they'd done it all along to begin an 'I told you so' type of crowing, though in fact nothing is yet proved. I think everyone who read about it early on must have pondered whether they somehow did it themselves in any case, the Portuguese police included.

Personally I find it interesting how much sympathy there has been for people who are after all middle-class and well-to-do, traditionally the sort I might expect The Sun to vilify, especially given how stupid they come across on the news. When Gerry McCann is quoted it seems like he should have said nothing, such as his recent "it's not fair" type of comment about how they couldn't use the million pound fund to find Madeleine to fund their legal defence against the Portuguese policy. At that point I felt the media were straining not to go out on the attack; when they brought up the McCanns speaking to Kingsley Napley for defence the two examples given were of General Pinochet and Chris Langham, which I think was a subtle attempt to push things away from a pro-McCann stance.