Truth, Lies, Madeleine McCann & Wathing The Parents
“TRUTH, lies, Madeleine and us.”
This is the front-page trail for the Times’ “exclusive” interview with Kate and Gerry McCann.
The cover of the paper’s Times2 supplement is given over to pictures of Madeleine McCann and her parents.
“Madeleine: one fact, many lies, endless grief,” comes the headline.
“It is now 124 days since Madeleine McCann disappeared. PENNY WARK charts a story that became global, lurid and often invented – and hears how the McCanns learnt to think positively after imagining the darkest scenarios and suffering uncontrollable grief,” says the Times.
And we are watching the parents. The paper’s one fact is that Madeleine McCann is missing. The other fact is that all the coverage in the media, the voyeurism as the McCanns toured the world, met the Pope and children in cinemas got scared has failed to find the missing child. All we have is public spectacle and the invitation to share the parents’ grief.
The Times’ writer says the reason we know so little about Madeleine’s disappearance is that she was abducted in Portugal, “where the segredo de justica law prevents the police from putting information about a criminal investigation in the public domain.”
A Neil Thompson, a former top copper who now runs a private security firm tells us: “A no-information rule means that you’re working in the dark.”
But the police have information, or are at least trying to get it. The media does not. It is they who are working in the dark, although there is nothing to stop them mounting a private investigation.
Thompson goes on: “Most child abductions are planned; it’s not a burglar who finds a child and takes it. Paedophiles go to places like Disney World.”
Good to see that among all the speculation and sensation, the Times’ reporter, who has been in Praia da Luz three weeks, is getting somewhere. Has Gerry McCann been to Euro Disney? Should he now go?
That question is not put to Mr McCann. He prefers to tell us that the flat in Praia da Luz where Madeleine was last seen is 50 yards from the restaurant where he and his wife were dining.
“It’s difficult because if you are [at home] cutting grass in the back with the mower, and that takes about half an hour, and the children are upstairs in a bedroom, you’d never bat an eyelid,” says Garry McCann. “That’s similar to how we felt.”
Kate McCann says: “If I put the children in the car the chances of having an accident would be greater than somebody coming in, braking into your apartment and lifting a child out of her bed.”
These are more facts. So too are the facts that Gerry and Kate and from “working-class backgrounds”. Kate is the only child of a Liverpool joiner and a civil servant.
A sightseer tells the Times: “I feel the same way that I felt when Princess Diana was killed.” The Times says the story has filled more front pages that any other event since the death of the Princess of Hearts.
That might well be the case. Readers learn that there is “increasing evidence that Madeleine sells newspaper”.
The Express has taken to featuring both the Princess and Madeleine on its front page, a bid to treble circulation.
And Madeleine McCann is on the Times’ front page. And we area watching her parents…
Posted: 4th, September 2007 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (205) | TrackBack | Permalink
