Getting Close To Madeleine McCann’s Parents
MADELEINE McCann is not on the Mirror’s front page. We are not looking for her today. We are looking at her mother Kate McCann.
“I AM COPING WITH THE GUILT,” says the headline. “Maddy mum pain as new DNA clues probed.”
Kate McCann is on the Mirror’s front page. Readers see her face. She is not talking to the world but to Mirror readers. That at least is the impression. The Mirror and the Express are locked in a fight to see which of them can be the official Madeleine McCann paper.
“MADEDLEINE,” says the Express’s front-page headline. “Police intercept parents’ phone calls and spy on their emails.”
Newspapers in Portugal says the local police have been watching the parents. We all have.
Dairio de Noticias says: “The police want to question the McCanns and their friends so that they can clarify the contradiction in their statements. They will put the telephone calls and emails which were intercepted to them.”
In the Mirror we see the “pain”. We are intruding into the mother’s grief, but then this is the story every parent can relate to. And there is a story to sell.
“I know the situation we were in that night. I have said all along that I didn’t think we were taking a risk,” says Kate McCann.
She is reliving the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. She is doing so on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. But the Mirror is up close. This is their story.
Does Kate feel guilty about leaving her children alone while she dined with friends? “I have actually come to terms with that a little bit,” says Kate McCann. And: “I do feel desperately sorry that I wasn’t with Madeleine when she was taken.”
But what of the whispering campaign against she and her husband? The McCanns’ friend Rachel Oldfield, who was with them in Portugal, is unimpressed. “It is very hurtful and all rather ludicrous,” says she.
She goes on: “Whether a journalist has had a bit of information and made the rest up, or the police are feeding some truth or untruths, I don’t know. I read a timetable of what was supposed to have happened in one paper and the timings are totally wrong.”
But the story is all. This is about keeping Madeleine McCann in the news, ensuring the disappearance of one child is the lead news story, above Iraq, floods and other missing persons.
What matter facts?
Posted: 9th, August 2007 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (28) | TrackBack | Permalink
