Michael Tracey est l'auteur de plusieurs reportages sur l'affaire JonBenét Ramsey, dans lesquels il prend farouchement le parti de l'innocence des parents en faisant fi de tous les éléments troublants. Il a à plusieurs reprises attiré l'attention et de là les ressources de la police sur des pistes qui se sont révélées grossièrement fausses. Dans cet article il compare l'affaire MC à l'affaire Ramsey dans l'unique intention de faire servir la première aux intérêts de sa thèse sur la seconde, sans aucune considération pour les faits.
in
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science - Vol. 3
No.15; August 2013
Pr. Michael Tracey
Journalism and
MassCommunication - University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado,
80309-USA
Abstract
One of the lingering
issues for journalism is the continuing problem of unethical
practices in pursuing stories. This essay looks at this issue by
considering the way in which a narrative was laid down by the media
about two infamous crimes that received enormous coverage, and
that shaped public opinion as to who the guilty parties
were. The case studies are the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey and the
abduction of Madeleine McCann.
1. Introduction
“The persecution of
individuals for no public good whatsoever is such a significant
decline in the standards of the press. We’ve now got a situation
where newspapers are hiring private detectives –we used to hire
reporters.” Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the British,
Murdoch owned, newspapers The Sunday Times ( 1967–1981 ) and The
Times (1981–1982 ) in evidence to the government appointed
Leveson inquiry into the ethics of British journalism ( May 17,
2012. )
On Christmas night 1996
JonBenet Patricia Ramsey was tortured and bludgeoned to death inher
home at 755 15thSt., Boulder, Colorado. JonBenet was six years old
with blond hair and blue eyes. On May 3rd, 2007 Madeleine Beth
McCann, a young English girl, was abducted from an holiday apartment
at the Ocean Club resort of Praia da Luz in south west Portugal. She
was about to turn four on May 12. She was blond, one eye was green
and blue, the other green, and her right eye had a marking called
a coloboma, which is where the pupil runs into the iris in
the form of black radial strip. She was just 36” tall,
and if you Google her name today you will get five million
results.
If you Google JonBenet’s
name, all these years later you will get 3,110,000. Search Amazon
books and you will find eleven books about Maddie, and
fifty-five that are directly about JonBenet’s murder or that
have sections dealing with it. No-one knows how much print coverage
there has been about these cases, other than the obvious fact that it
has been vast. Neither is it known how much television news has
covered both cases, though again it is enormous, and there have been
many documentaries about both cases, but particularly about
JonBenet’s death. In June 2008 the search term “Madeleine McCann”
generated some 3,700 videos on YouTube attracting over seven
million responses
(Kennedy, 2010 ). Today, use the search term JonBenet Ramsey, and
there are 3090 videos on YouTube.
Two Narratives
2.1 the Case of JonBenet
Ramsey
Almost from the very
beginning of the Ramsey case something was quite obvious:
there was a serious problem with the manner of the media
coverage in that it was both overdone and unfair. Overdone
in that there was so much of it, locally, nationally and
globally, and unfair because it is utterly clear that from the very
beginning any presumption of innocence was overwhelmingly denied
the Ramsey family, and in particular JonBenet’s parents,
John and Patsy Ramsey. The first story in the Boulder Daily
Camera was on December 27 1996:
“A 6-yeat old Boulder
girl reported kidnapped early Thursday was found dead in her
parents'house later that afternoon. Boulder police said a family
member discovered the body of Jon Benet (sic) Ramsey -
daughter of Access Graphics president John Ramsey and Patricia
Ramsey in the basement of the family house at 755 15th St. about 1:30
p.m. The child was the 1995
Little Miss Colorado and
a student at Martin Park Elementary School, according to a family
friend.”
On the morning of the
27th December 1996, the Rocky Mountain News (RMN) ran a story that
was the first hint of law enforcement’s suspicions about the
Ramseys. It quoted an anonymous source –it would later turn out to
be assistant district attorney, Bill Wise - as saying that it was
very unusual for a kidnap victim’s body to be found at home: “
‘It’s not adding up,’ he said.” Charlie Brennan, who wrote
the story, knew from the beginning that police thought the parents
were guilty: “ I certainly had that sense at the time, yes. I
had the belief that the police were under a strong suspicion from
the beginning that it had to be the parents.” (interview with
author) Julie Hayden of
Denver’s Channel 7, who
was known to have very good police sources, says that before the end
of December, “ we were beginning to get the sense that the
police were not hunting Boulder for some madkidnapper, that
the police were looking more inside the family...” (interview with
author).
On the 28th December
Brennan wrote: “ JonBenet’s death remained a mystery Friday.
Boulder police said no-one has been identified –or eliminated –as
a suspect in the slaying.”
On 30December, Mike
McPhee and Alan Snel, writing in the Denver Post, reported :
“Unconfirmed media reports say that (a) ransom note demanded
$118000 plus future demands, and that the father, John Ramsey, found
the body. Police...would not con firm or deny either report.”
On the 1st January 1997
the RMN reported that the “killer placed duct tape over the
6-year-old’s mouth and tightened a chord around her neck
until she died, a source close to the investigation said...
Among those providing (DNA) samples was JonBenet’s father,
John Ramsey, 53, president of Boulder-based computer
manufacturer Access Graphics. Ramsey has hired prominent criminal
defense attorney Bryan Morgan to represent him. Acting on
Morgan’s advice, Ramsey has stopped talking to police, sources
said.” The article then noted that Patsy Ramsey had hired Pat
Burke to represent her, and that: “Police have said that
no one close to the case has been ruled out as a suspect.”
Brennan then added another detail that would, as with all
his stories, metastasize, saying that the Ramseys had returned
to Georgia for the funeral and that, “John Ramsey is a
pilot, and the family traveled to Georgia in his plane...”
(emphasis added). The plane was described as a jet.
The speed with which the
story of what had “really,” happened on Christmas night at 755
15th St, is also attested to by a piece in the Camera on the
1stJanuary by Elliot Zaret. It is fascinating because while at face
value it was a straightforward piece of reporting, it
containedmany of the emerging threads of the story-line that
was increasingly focused on the Ramseys: “John Ramsey...has
hired a prominent criminal defense lawyer, even though no-one
in the Ramsey family has been named a suspect in the
case...Denver broadcast media carried an unconfirmed report that
JonBenet fully clothed with duct tape over her mouth, was discovered
by her father and a friend. Police have taken blood and hair samples
from all family members except JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, who
police said wastoo distraught to give the samples...” Patsy
Ramsey had, in fact, given the samples. The piece then
quotes Mimi Wesson, a University of Colorado law professor,
saying that “the police have disclosed few details about the
investigation, which Wesson said could pay off later. ‘If you
announce a suspect early and later you prosecute that suspect, it
can look as though you rushed to judgment as we saw in the O. J
Simpson case...As for why Ramsey, who is not a suspect, would
hire an attorney, Wesson said the answer may be simple. ‘
he’s a sophisticated businessman,’ Wesson said. ‘He’s used
to dealing with attorneys. Don’t think it’s unusual at all that
he consulted an attorney.’”
Here were many of the
elements of the evolving story, all of which were well in place
within barely a few days of the crime: the fact that they’d
even had to give blood and hair samples; the lawyering up;
the passing, glancing reference to OJ, another wealthy man;
John Ramsey as the sophisticated mind, guiding the family’s
emerging strategy. It was far from the truth, since the decision
to hire the attorneys had been made by a family friend and
business partner of John Ramsey and former assistant district
attorney, Mike Bynum. He did so because from the morning of December
26 he had a sense that the police were already focusing primarily on
the Ramseys.
What tended to be
forgotten, partly because it was never really disclosed, was that
both Ramseys were, according to those who were taking care of them
including their physician, Dr. Bueff, basically emotional wrecks,
given to sudden explosions of sobbing, on heavy medication for
anxiety and depression. The image though was what mattered,
a powerful team being put together by John Ramsey to
slaughter the minnows of Boulder law enforcement.
Wealth was going to
triumph again as it had in the OJ case (Schiller, 2001; Dunne, 2001.)
Boulder Mayor Leslie
Durgin on January 2, the day after the Ramseys had given an
interview to CNN in which they said that “there is a killer on
the loose”, spoke tolocal media said that police were not
looking for a crazed killer on the streets of Boulder. She added: “
I think in Boulder we have no need to fear that there is someone
wandering the streets of Boulder, as has been portrayed by some
people, looking for young children to attack. Boulder is
safe. It has always been a safe community. It continues to be a
safe community.” For good measure she added that she had been told
that “ there was no forced entry into the home. The body was found
in a place where people are saying someone had to know the house.”
A headline in the Rocky Mountain News declared: “No need to worry
about killer on the loose, cops say.”
On the 3rd the headline
was: “Cops checking family background.” On the 3 January also,
Brennan reported: “There was no forced entry into the Ramsey
home, according to a source close to the investigation.”
The following day he quoted the architect of the house saying that it
would be “pretty difficult to break in.” On the 4th the
headline was again: “ No need to fear Mayor tells
Boulder.” The immediate problem with this is now obvious:
how did she and the police know that there wasn’t a child killer
in Boulder? When asked later why she had said this, she
replied: “It was done in large part to allay the fears of
children in our community and to let people know that the
information that I had at the time was that we did not have some
crazed person wandering the streets of University Hill.” When
asked who she cleared this with, she replied: “The
police chief...” ( interview with the author).
Perhaps more than any two
statements those by Wise and Durgin, which were repeated on
television, radio and in the press, were the birthing moment of the
public’s growing belief that the Ramseys, one or both, were
involved in killing JonBenet. The idea that there had been
no break in ~ a comment that hid behind casuistry in the
comment that there were “no signs of forced entry” ~
along with the notion that the house was a maze through
which only someone with an intimate knowledge of its lay out
would be able to maneuver was becoming a key element in the
narrative that was unfolding. Brennan says:“That was coming from
law enforcement sources. And you know, I know that you know, that
this is a story that was heavily reported through unnamed
sources telling us from the end of December that they saw
no signs of forced entry.” ( interview with author.) The
problem here is that the law enforcement source, used by
Brennan, didn’t trouble him with the information, contained in
police report from December 26, that there would have been no
need to “force” an entry since the alarm was off and
there were numerous open windows and doors.
Anyone could have
entered the house with little or no difficulty. Law
enforcement, however, because they were already forming a strong
opinion that the Ramseys were involved in the murder, had to begin to
create a narrative that no-one could have got into the “fortress”
on 15th street.Within little more than a week of reporting, the
story had shifted from bare bones, to the heavy implication of
it being a sex crime involving the father, to the leaking of basic
facts such as the duct tape, the ransom amount, the fractured skull,
the garroting which were true, to the suggestion that there
were no signs of forced entry, which while on the face of it
was true was in fact highly misleading. Another story that
emerged early in the reportage was that John Ramsey had flown his
private jet back to Atlanta, with his family and JonBenet’s
casket on board became a key element in the unfolding narrative. The
implication was clear: that John Ramsey was so calm, so lacking in
grief, so in control, that he could fly a jet. Ergo, he was a
sociopath who was clearly capable of killing his own daughter. The
source,according to Brennan, who broke the story, was a member of law
enforcement who had always been “reliable.” The problem with this
is that story was not true. Dan Glick, a stringer for Newsweek,
checked the FAA take off and landing log at JeffCo Airport and
discovered that in fact the jet had been sent by the Chairman of
Lockheed Martin, which had bought Ramsey’s company, Access
Graphics, and that the pilot was a Lockheed pilot.
When Brennan was asked
why he hadn’t checked out the story? He responded, “maybe you can
tell me it wasn’t his plane and he didn’t fly it...” (
interview with author).
By the end of January
1997 the murder was a major national story. There were
something like three hundred reporters in Boulder covering
the case. A study of television news magazines would later
show that JonBenet was the biggest story of any kind in 1997
until
Princess Diana died
(Video Information Report Study, 1998). As the months and
years passed this hardly changed and in October, 1999, the month
the grand jury had to conclude, she once again was the biggest story
for all the major news magazines and morning shows (Video
Information Report, 1998). Another small but important story emerged
in March 1997 when it was reported that police found it “curious”
that there were “no footprints in the snow,” around the
house. The implication was obvious, and intended: no
footprints, no intruder. The slight problem with this, as law
enforcement knew and the crime scene photos from December 26
make clear, was that there was little or no snow around the
house, in fact the photos show that all the pavement around the
house was totally clear of snow. It is important to be
clear that these various stories, often began with local but
quickly appeared in the tabloids, on television,in newspapers, news
magazines, on talk radio and became very much a part of public and
private chatter.
Perhaps the most
profound example of a drawing together of the various
mythologies about the case was in a piece in Vanity Fair by
Annie Bardach, based in considerable part on “information”
provided by one particular detective (Bardach, 1997). She
wrote that the Ramsey’s behavior was “odd.” She quoted
Linda Arndt, the first detective on the scene, as reporting that
between 10.30 and noon John Ramsey left the house to pick up the
family mail, the implication being that he was in reality doing
something to cover up the crime. Arndt had said this, but it would
later to be shown to be incorrect. She reported that only
a small child or a midget could have entered through the
basement window.
This simply was not true,
as the source knew, because he also knew that police officers had
entered
the basement through the
window to see if it was possible. She reported that Hal
Haddon, a senior Ramsey attorney, was a political ally of the
District Attorney, Alex Hunter, when in fact they had never
even met. She reported investigators saying that the ligatures
around JonBenet’s neck and wrists were “very loose,” and
were consistent with a staging. This was in fact not true, as we
now know from the autopsy photos which show that the ligature was
so tight it caused a deep gouge in the child’s neck. She repeated
the story that there were no signs of forced entry, and no
footprints in the snow, when we now know from the police
report that there would have been no reason to break in
because there were unlocked doors and windows, and the pavement
and sidewalks around the house were clear of snow. She reported the
police case that JonBenet was a chronic bed wetter and
that Patsy had taken JonBenet to her pediatrician 30 times.
In fact, it was 27 over a four year period, some of those
with the nanny. Dr. Francesco Bueff, the pediatrician, argues
that there was nothing abnormal about this, that there were various
reasons for the visits, including a number for sinus
infections, that there were no signs of abuse and that she
was not a chronic bed-wetter( interview with author). Bardach also
reported the incorrect story that John Ramsey flew a private jet
back to Atlanta for the funeral.
On January 4, Charlie
Brennan, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, introduced
something that again would emerge as a key narrative, saying
not that JonBenet was sexually assaulted, which he and
others had already reported, and which the autopsy report
would confirm, but that: “The girl was sexually abused.”
No doubt Brennan felt that he was using the term as a synonym for
assault. It is not clear that his source felt the same way since
“abuse,” is a generic condition whereas “assault,” is
situation specific. It was however the beginning of another
key story line: that JonBenet had been sexually abused over a period
of time prior to the murder.
A review of the Child and
Family Services report on JonBenet’s nine-year old brother Burke –
which as a matter of law had to be undertaken to assess if he would
be at risk were he to be returned to his parents; an independent
review of the autopsy report which was commissioned from the
Denver Medical Examiner; an interview with
JonBenet’s
pediatrician, who also reviewed her medical history; and numerous
interviews with family and friends lead to the overwhelming
conclusion that that was no evidence that there had been any
sexual abuse. (Mills and Tracey, 1998). However, vast numbers
of people simply assumed that there had been for the simple
reason that this is what they were being told, ad infinitum.
Within a remarkably
short period of time all the details of the story pointing
to the guilt of the parents were in place. That almost
everyone of those details were either less than profound or downright
wrong really didn’t seem to matter. The relationship between the
media, which relished a story so rich in ratings and circulation
pickings, and law enforcement which wanted to create a public
climate which would force an indictment, worked its
mendacious magic – even if it did not in the end lead to an
indictment. A Gallup poll in November 1997 showed that 88% of
the public believed that one or other of the Ramsey family
had killed JonBenet. When the same question was posed in
March, 2000 67% of the public still believed that one or
other of the Ramseys killed JonBenet.
2.2 The Case of Madeleine
McCann
Madeleine (Maddie)
McCann, a young English girl, went missing from a holiday
apartment in Portugal on May 3rd 2007 sometime between about 8
pm and 10pm. By the following day at least one detective
was telling journalists that there were doubts about whether
Madeleine had really been abducted and that “police thought the
couple were not telling the truth...” (Chrisman, 2007). Cette source "Michael Chrisman" n'est pas documentée et ces propos ne figurent dans aucun journal. The story
appeared the following day, Saturday May 5, in the respected
Portuguese newspaper, Diario de Noticias. The story, headlined “This
Is A Very Badly Told Story,” had been written by Jose Manuel
Oliveira who had received an off the record briefing by one
of the top investigators of the Policia Judiciaria ( PJ ),
the Portuguese criminal investigation police and said that
“the headline/quote is based on the police and PJ sense that the
testimonies gathered from the initial questioning of the McCanns,
friends, and staff of the Ocean Club were confusing.
Oliveira believes this
report was leaked because the PJ were beginning to have ‘doubts’
about the McCanns – that they were somehow connected or they knew
someone who had had something to do with her disappearance – not at
this stage that she might be dead. Astonishingly Oliveria says he
got the information from the PJ for this leak by 5pm., on the
4th May – less than 24 hours after Maddie disappeared...”
( Chrisman, 2007).
This was immediately
denied by the JP, but on the 7th May Diario de Noticias published an
article headlined “Police clues points to Madeleine’s death,”
with an inside page headline “Port authority already looking for
Madeleine’s body,” citing “police sources.” At the same time
another paper was reporting that police suspicions were based on the
couple’s behavior, and one said that detectives “suspected them
because their wives said Kate was too controlled to be the distraught
mother” while another claimed forensic scientists reported that her
controlled public appearance and make up indicated a “cold and
manipulative” personality. This narrative was unfolding at a time
when Maddie’s disappearance could still be counted in hours.
By May 7 numerous
Portuguese papers were now openly pointing the finger of suspicion at
the McCanns, and reporting that the police believed Maddie was dead.
“24 Horas” reported that the police were now examining the past
of the McCanns. Diario de Noticias headlined an article, “Police
clues points to Maddie’s death” for a story based on “police
sources.” On May 11 newspapers cited “police sources” as saying
that there had been “seven days of contradictions” in what the
McCanns and their friends had been saying.
On May 13, Jose Barra de
Costa, who had spent thirty years with the PJ, with experience in
homicide, armed robbery and sexual crimes, and was now a university
professor of criminology with Lusofona University and a lecturer at
the Police Institute – that is, “an expert” – said: “...I
am informed by people in the know, that Madeleine’s parents
dedicated themselves in the practice of
swinging and that this
activity could be related to the disappearance of the child. By
nature, a relationship of swinging is promiscuous and atypical and
can therefore have an involvement and exchange of relationships
leading to an act of revenge, which could have resulted in the
disappearance of the child.
Q - Who are these people
in the know?
A - I cannot reveal my
source, otherwise I would risk losing it...” (Costa, 2007).
In the weeks after the
disappearance the McCanns travelled extensively in the hope of
keeping the story alive on the grounds that if they didn’t it
would go cold and people would stop looking
–they clung to the
hope that she was still alive.
They even met with
the Pope at the Vatican, who promised to pray for her safe
return. Numerous politicians, celebrities and sports stars
expressed their “concern” for “our Maddie.” However,
the McCann’s campaign to keep the story alive would prove
what some might take to be disastrous. The accusations that
were alive in Portugal had not really taken hold elsewhere. That
changed when at a press conference they were giving in Berlin on 6th
June, 2007, a German journalist, Sabine Muller, asked them:“How do
you feel that more and more people feel the way you behaved was not
the way people would normally when a child is abducted...they
seem to imply that you might have something to do with
it?” The journalist Jose Oliveira would later say: “It was clear
that the police genuinely believed the couple were involved and were
leaking stories in an attempt to put pressure on them...in the hope
that they might confess or inform on each other...” (Oliveira,
2007).
It was at this moment
that the story of Maddie’s disappearance and what role
the McCann’s and their friends might have played shifted to
a whole new level. The frenzied “feral beasts,” to use
Tony Blair’s famous phrase about British tabloid journalists,
saw that here was a story that would pump circulation and
ratings. However, there was nothing the McCann’s, who had sought
to use the media to help find her, could do about it because it
wasn’t just the media that were hungry for more, they had
a vast public appetite to satisfy.
On the 7th August, 2007
Oliveira published a story in the Lisbon daily Diario de Noticas,
based on a leak from the police, that said that the PJ had
concluded that Maddie was dead and that the McCanns were now
suspects, that they had been so since July and that the police in
Portugal and Britain were watching them closely as their suspicions
deepened.
In early September
Noticas published a story, written by their crime reporter
Jose Manuel Ribeiro, about Kate McCann’s diary, which the
police had seized and which they apparently believed was an
important piece ofevidence. The story also appeared on Portuguese
television and claimed that in it Kate wrote of her difficulty
in handling Maddie’s “hyperactivity” and complained
about Gerry’s lack of help. The British investigative
journalist, David Rose, who has for many years reported on
miscarriages of justice, was in Portugal covering the case for the
British newspaper The Daily Mail.
He notes how the
story “was reported from Berlin to Baltimore” and writes
of how he bumped into Ribeiro outside the apartment where
Maddie disappeared: “ I congratulated him on his scoop,
but he shook his head, disconsolate. Already, he complained,
it was turning to dust. Ribeiro said he had been given the
story by an impeccable source, but already officials in Lisbon
were denying it, and the source himself could no longer assure him
it was true. ‘Why is bad information getting out to the
public?’ he asked. ‘Because we are being given it.’”
As Rose notes
sarcastically, the denial of the significance of the diary
never quite made it to what he calls “the foreigners,” of
which the most significant contingent were the British media (Rose,
2007).
In August a specialist
forensic team from the UK was sent out to Portugal to help
the investigation. What they were said to be finding led
the PJ to summon Kate McCann for an interview of 6th
September, where she was interviewed for eleven hours. Well after
midnight her Portuguese lawyer arrived at the apartment they had
moved to with an offer from the PJ: if she pleaded guilty
to manslaughter she would only have to spend two years in
prison. She refused. On the 7th September she and Gerry were
interviewed again by the PJ after which they were both declared
“arguidos,” suspects. They were allowed to leave Portugal on the
9th
September, and anyone who
turned on the evening news that night would see them being driven to
the airport followed by a posse of cars packed with journalists. As
is now widely known the story exploded. In Britain The Express group
of newspapers alone would run well over a hundred front
page stories, effectively
accusing the McCanns of being involved. This comes as no
particular surprise since as they were returning to Britain
scores of stories began to run about the forensic “evidence”
that had been found: “substantial quantities” of Maddie’s hair
in the Renault car rented by the McCanns on their return to Portugal
twenty - five days after the disappearance; “bodily fluids”
from Maddie’s decomposing body had been found under the
upholstery of the car; cadaver dogs had picked up “the
scent of death” – a popular phrase that; that there was evidence
that her body had been kept in a fridge, and then moved in the car
to be buried in a shallow, hidden grave somewhere in the Spanish
countryside, a lonely resting place for little Maddie, and all of it
given particular force because, it was said, this evidence had been
discovered not by the Portuguese but by “our” team, British
forensic experts.
It immediately got worse
when, for example, on 10th September, Sky News correspondent Martin
Brunt said that analysis of materials gathered from the
McCann’s rental car by Britain’s Forensic Science Service,
including it was claimed blood, hair and other fibers, had
produced findings which were “significant.” Brunt reported:
“According to police it shows the presence of Madeleine’s body in
the boot of the family hire car five weeks after she had
disappeared...” a claim that was almost immediately denied
by the national director of the PJ, Alipio Ribeiro, who said
that the tests had not been conclusive.
David Mills, who was
producing a documentary for the BBC current affairs
programme, Panorama, with his associate producer, Michael
Chrisman, discovered that at more or less the same time a Portuguese
detective told the journalist Ned Temko that the DNA evidence was
not what it seemed, that whatever limited DNA existed was degraded
and evidentially useless, and that there was no blood in
the car as had been reported. Perhaps most devastatingly to
the “evidence” being played out in the media – one
headline on Sunday September 28th
read, “Maddie Buried in
Spain” – Mills and Chrisman point out that travelling with the
McCanns in September in their hire car was a close friend and
filmmaker, Jon Corner, who noted that the boot of the car
“ was full of camera equipment, it was full of posters...”
(BBC, 2007).
One might surmise that
had there been a child’s body in there, Corner might
have noticed. There was one other slight problem with the
story that Maddie’s body had been in the wheel well in
the boot of the car.
Doug Longhini, an
experienced producer/investigator for the CBS programme, 48
Hours, working with a Portuguese journalist, rented the same
model as that rented by the McCanns, and discovered an
interesting fact, it doesn’t have a wheel well: “It was a
seven passenger vehicle and two pop-up seats are in the rear where a
spare tire would otherwise have been in a five passenger version...”
(Longhini, 2011).
The case against the
McCanns fell apart as it became clear that the crime scene had been
hopelessly
compromised (when a
Portuguese forensics team turned up three days after the
disappearance they refused to even try and process it ),
forensic evidence pointed nowhere, the treatment of the
“evidence” in the media was scientifically illiterate. There
was, in short, no case.
The inflection of the
media coverage may have been crude and obviously slanted but, as
with the Ramsey case, it led to one overwhelming conclusion in the
public mind: a Sunday Times poll, published on 16 September
2007, found that 80% of the British public believed that
the parents of Maddie McCann could have been involved in her
disappearance and demise; a web site set up by Gerry McCann’s
sister, Philomena, received 250 million visits and ten
thousand abusive emails, and 20,000 people signed an on-line
petition asking Leicestershire social services to investigate the
couple for child neglect.
The final police report
on the case was delivered to Jose Pinto Monteiro, the Portuguese
Attorney General, on 1st July 2008, and on 21st July he
announced that the case would be closed because of a lack
of evidence that any crime had been committed by the McCanns
or anyone else who had been investigated. On the same day
the arguido status of the McCanns was lifted. The fact is, though,
that the case really wasn’t over because of lingering realities:
the life of the McCanns had been destroyed by the actions of the
crude police investigation, the poverty of the journalism about the
case, the manipulation of that journalism by law enforcement and the
mos
t brutal fact of all,
Maddie was still missing.
3. Conclusions
There are a number of
ways of thinking about the media and these two cases. The most
immediate and obvious, and therefore telling, point is that they
were both huge stories, particularly, though far from
exclusively, for the tabloids, about two strikingly similar young
girls, from two very comfortably off families .
Almost from the first day
there was, in both cases, a close relationship between the police and
the media, with the former supplying the latter with “evidence”
which then was presented as fact. This was because in both cases, the
police immediately believed that the parents were involved and that,
therefore, the means, lying, justified the end, getting an
indictment and a conviction. Both also demonstrated what can
only be described as an extraordinary amount of lazy
journalism. David Rose describes how for most foreign
journalists covering the McCann story, every day would start at
Hugo Beaty’s bar “shortly after it opens at 9am, with an informal
briefing to the foreign press by a locally resident British woman who
normally makes a meager living acting as an occasional interpreter –
for the Policia Judiciaria.
Every morning the
woman...goes through the Portuguese tabloids and translates
their ever -
more febrile articles.
Every afternoon the foreigners...recycle the tales for consumers
abroad...” (Rose, 2007). In testimony to the UK Parliament’s
select committee on Culture, Media and Sport, that was investigating
the question of press standards and that took sharp aim at the McCann
case, Clarence Mitchell, who had been hired for the rather desperate
job of helping the McCanns deal
with the press, said:
“They (British journalists) would get the Portuguese press
each morning translated for them...Then no matter what rubbish,
frankly, was appearing in the Portuguese press from whatever source
( they’d file copy in the British press)...there was no
effort to pursue any investigative journalism as we might
recognize it...” (Mitchell, 2010).
The dependency culture of
using “sources” revealed, yet again, the relationship that now
exists betw
een two core
institutions, the media and the judicial system. In fact,
increasingly these two elemental parts of society seem to be
engaged in a dance macabre, where the law has become part
of the entertainment industry, and where that industry is
consistently fed and led by leaks from law enforcement. The
media and law enforcement can perhaps be said to have become
business associates. There are obvious implications here for
the whole integrity of the judicial process, and a clear sense
that in such cases as Ramsey and McCann the long standing debate
about free press versus fair trial is, to all intents and purposes,
over. It has become quite clear, at least in the United States,
that in the collision between the 1st amendment to the
Constitution, which guarantees among other things a free press
and the 6th which was intended to ensure that the accused
had a presumption of innocence, the 1st now consistently trumps
the 6th. In the UK things are somewhat different, and growing
so by the day, partly because of cases such as the media
coverage of the McCanns, but also because of the “hacking”
scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s British papers.
There is, in fact, an
ongoing and profound debate as to how to regulate, and where
necessary punish, newspapers without impinging on press freedom. The
select committee on Culture, Media and Sport which investigated press
standards, in its final report wrote: “Undue pressure on
journalists...must tend to increase the risk of distortion,
inaccuracy and unfairness in reporting. Of course, it is
impossible to say for certain that untrue articles were
written in the McCann case as a result of pressure from editors and
news desks.It is, however, clear that the press acted as a
pack, ceaselessly hunting out fresh angles where new
information
was scarce...no
consideration was given to how reporting might prejudice any
future trial. It is our belief that competitive and
commercial factors contributed to abysmal standards in the
gathering and publishing of news about the McCann case. That
public demand for such news was exceptionally high is no
excuse for such a lowering of standards...While the lack of
official information clearly made reporting more difficult, we
do not accept that it provided an excuse or justification for
inaccurate, defamatory reporting. Further, when newspapers are
obliged to rely on anonymous sources and second - hand
information, they owe it to their readers clearly to
distinguish speculation from fact...” (UK Parliament, CCMS, 2010).
What was also revealed
in these two cases, as shown by the polling data, was the
sheer ease with which public opinion can be fashioned even if
there is an equally clear sense that the public are complicit in
that process, as if driven by some psychological need to
presume guilt absent any meaningful evidence, what the poet
W.D . Snodgrass described as “the vaguely, furiously driven.”
What becomes clear is that there is conceptually no difference
between the ability of law enforcement to manipulate public
opinion about the allegedly murderous acts of venal parents, and
the ability of government to manipulate public opinion, by
manipulating the media, into seeking revenge against a murderous
dictator in a far off land who was “behind” 9/11 and had
weapons of mass destruction. The scale is different, the process of
manipulation is not (Rich, 2006; PIPA, 2003; PIPA, 2004).
At the very least the
data on public opinion speaks powerfully to the long standing
argument by scholars about the role of the media in constructing
public “understandings” about the world around them (
Lipmann, 1920; Mills, 1959). This also suggests, yet again, whole
populations that are, to use terms identified by Hadley Cantril and
his colleagues decades ago, highly “suggestible” and
lacking in “critical ability” (Cantril, H., et al, 1940).
It is precisely because the public can be so readily misled
or confused that it is of the utmost importance that
journalism and journalists operate at the highest levels of accuracy,
professionalism and responsibility. That these qualities were so
astonishingly absent in the coverage of these two cases is as
unfortunate as it is revealing.
Finally, there remains
the vexing issue implied at the beginning of this piece, that the
widespread interest in these cases, which the media were so
willing to feed, suggests that something is being expressed
from within, and about, the society. To address the social origins
of that interest will take a whole different essay. Briefly, however,
one might mention one commentary that is perhaps getting close to an
answer.The writer Mick Hume said of the McCann case, though his
argument readily resonates with the Ramsey case, “ at the
risk of being accused of callousness, what is this public
outpouring about?” Within a few lines he answered his own
question:“The McCann case has been turned into the latest public
focus through which people in a fragmented Britain feel able to come
together in a collective display of emotion, to show that we share
one another’s pain and are on the side of good....It is about a
public display of belonging, of feeling part of an emotional
collective at a time when there seems little in society or its values
to hold people together...The campaign for ‘Our Maddie’ may
indeed be well intentioned; but it has come to look like an
increasingly morbid symptom of a society that is missing
something other than a little girl... Referencing the fact
that people took to wearing basically utterly useless
wristbands with the words “Look for Madeleine,” he adds
that for many wearers “the real message is more like ‘Look
at Me’” (Hume, 2007).
This is rather good
social theory since what he is pointing to is a public deeply
alienated, anomic, isolated, lonely and that Maddie, and JonBenet,
were not just useful commodities for the media to exploit but,
through the act of righteous mourning and fevered condemnation
of the “guilty” parties, a kind of sedative to deal
with what Alan Bennett calls “our own particular emptiness.”
(Bennett, 2003)
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