Madeleine McCann: Katie Price, JonBenet Ramsey And PR Paedos
MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann – THE third anniversary of Our Maddie approaches. The PR offensive is in full swing. The McCanns are doing what they hope will keep their child in the public eye and bring her back alive and well to them. And the media is lapping it up:
The Independent: “Terence Blacker: Depressing clichés sadly perpetuated”
The decision to release images of Madeleine McCann wearing make-up seems misguided.
The Katie Price factor, right? She put her daughter in fake lashes and we got the predictable tabloid story that paedos would see the images and be unable to resist Princess. Blacker asks:
Can the McCanns be thinking straight?
We are invited to wonder about the McCanns’ mental state? We have been watching the McCanns – and now we are analysing them. Blacker see the altered image of Our Maddie, the one in which she is wearing blue eye-shadow.
It seems a bizarre and unsettling development. Clearly, Kate and Gerry McCann have been living through a nightmare of unimaginable horror and perhaps, even after three years, they are not thinking straight.
Not unimaginable. Far form it. For years we have been invited to imagine the horror. A weeks or so ago, Esther Rantzen was imagining the horrors for all of us.
If so, someone should surely have pointed out to them that, in a case over which paedophilia casts an obvious shadow, it looks downright weird when a photograph which has the effect of sexualising the missing child becomes part of the campaign to find her.
Eh? Make-up makes the child look sexually available? Well, it does to paedos. But do paedos need the make-up? Did any of you look at the image and get turned on by Our Maddie?
Madeleine McCann is no JonBenet Ramsey, the little beauty queen who went missing. Our Maddie’s looks have always been relevant to the media narrative – the blonde, blue-eyed angel. But to think dressing up in mum’s stuff for fun make you look like a temptress is absurd.
Obviously, the make-up game and the photograph were innocent at the time but, when the private picture is released into the public domain in these circumstances, something altogether nastier kicks in.
In your mind, it might. It’s paedo panic!
What was the point of this exercise, apart from getting more news coverage?
No other point. That is the stated point. Although, as ever, we are invited to gawp at the McCanns and feel their pain. We are invited to stare at the emotional exhibits.
At a time when there is justified concern over Primark selling Little Miss Naughty padded bras for eight-year-olds and allegations that Playboy brands are being aimed at the primary school market, the circulation of this can only feed prurience of the very worst kind.
Can it?
Maybe it was a misjudgement, but it confirms a niggling sense that the McCanns’ publicity–at-all-costs campaign has seriously lost its way.
It lost its way ages ago. None of the publicity has achieved the return of their daughter. All the media onslaught has achieved is to fill lots of space in newspapers and broadcasts. It has made Madeleine McCann Our Maddie, the unblinking benchmark for missing children. And it has made the McCanns a story akin to the dead donkey – slow news day? Press F8 for Our Maddie.
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Kate and Gerry McCann give an interview to Portuguese TV channel RTP's reporter Sandra Felgueiras, following the launch of a new video by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) initiative, at the Millbank Studios in London as the couple continue the search for their daughter, Madeleine, who disappeared while on holiday in Portugal in May 2007.
Posted: 4th, May 2010 | In: Madeleine McCann Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
