Innuendo becomes currency of news in MMC case - 11.10.2013 John Jewell* - The Conversation
When Madeleine McCann
tragically disappeared whilst on holiday in Portugal in May 2007, it
became the news story of the year. The nature and scale of the
reporting was unprecedented – as was the public interest in the
story. Madeleine’s disappearance (and the speculation around the
circumstances of it) meant the story occupied airtime and newsprint
on a level not seen since the death of Princess Diana ten years
before. The intensity and frequency of reporting and speculation was
staggering.
Le fait-divers de l'année.
By my count, the Daily
Express and Sunday Express combined had “Maddie” as lead front
page story with picture 23 times in September 2007. And, in fact,
there was no day throughout that month when the front pages did not
contain some sort of reference to Madeleine or her parents, Kate and
Gerry.
On sait maintenant pourquoi : les MC, ou plutôt Madeleine's Fund, autrement dit l'argent donné par le public, paya un demi-million de livres pour que l'affaire reste à la une pendant un an.
Since 2007 the
investigations into the disappearance have continued, as has the
speculative reporting and high-profile international PR campaign run
by the McCann family to keep Madeleine’s disappearance in the
public eye. Now, with the BBC due to broadcast a reconstruction of
events surrounding Madeleine’s disappearance on Crimewatch and the
British police announcing they are to analyse mobile phone data from
thousands of people who were around the Portuguese resort of Praia da
Luz at the time of the vanishing, there is renewed interest in the
case.
This week has seen the
Sunday Mirror publish an “exclusive” which revealed that
Madeleine had been seen alive on a Mediterranean beach just a few
weeks ago. Then, on October 9, the Daily Star, the Express and the
Mirror all devoted their front pages to Kate McCann’s wish to
appear in court to “confront” former Portuguese police chief
Goncalo Amaral.
He had written in his
book that Madeleine had died in an accident which her parents
covered up before hiding her body. Ahead of the Panorama programme,
Sky News has reported a new picture of a possible suspect connected
to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann which will be released by
police.
What is troubling about
these new reports – and this is true for the whole affair since
2007 – is that in the absence of fact, insinuation and innuendo
becomes the currency of news. To this day, Madeleine’s
disappearance is the only relevant fact of this terrible affair. What
we have seen on television and in the press is a situation where
innuendo and speculation are presented as fact on one day and as
nonsense the next. The process is one of the peddling and recycling
of the same stories. This week’s sighting of Madeleine is only the
latest of countless since 2007, where she been reportedly recognised
everywhere from Algeria to Arizona.
Ce que l'on voit depuis le premier jour, c'est une spéculation, l'enlèvement, évoquée comme un fait.
But why does the
Madeleine McCann affair still command interest in a Britain where,
according to recent research, a child goes missing every three
minutes ?
The decision taken by the
McCann family to keep their daughter in the public eye is clearly
significant. They have used a highly sophisticated PR campaign to
make sure that Madeleine is not forgotten. They believe, we are told,
that the world will forget she is missing if the story falls off the
news agenda. To that end “Team McCann” as the operation has been
dubbed, has ensured a constant flow of information is available to
the media.
Plutôt qu'un flux d'informations, un flux étourdissant de spéculations et de désinformations intarissables.
We must also remember
that people identify with this case because throughout history,
missing children have represented the worst that can happen to
adults. All parents can point to this case and shudder. It has become
a sort of national collective worst experience scenario.
The press has encouraged,
via comment threads, a form of participatory journalism where members
of the public can respond to particular reports, often in severe
ways. An article written by Roy Greenslade in October 2007 expressing
pity for the McCann’s in the media “spider’s web” was greeted
below the line with comments such as this:
Why should anyone “pity” the McCanns. They have brought all this down on their own heads.
We can ask ourselves
whether our fascination with Madeleine is a product of celebrity
culture, where we are routinely fixated with the fate of individuals
we don’t know and never will. Is it a further example of the Diana
syndrome where there is a mass transference of public empathy onto
others, made all the more striking by our increasing alienation from
each other in a physical sense?
Is our fascination an
example of a kind of collective bias in favour of the middle classes?
It is a fact that scores of children disappear every year yet not one
has received a fraction of the attention given to Madeleine who comes
from a family of wealthy, white, photogenic doctors.
The fact that the
Madeleine mystery – and I use my words carefully – began abroad
in less affluent, less prosperous Portugal may also be significant in
why we’re so interested. This is because (in a sense) we as nation
can absolve ourselves from responsibility. Despite evidence to the
contrary in terms of crimes committed against children in Britain, we
can tell ourselves that this is crime that happened because the
family was abroad.
So in a sense we and the
McCann family become one representing Britain against foreign
incompetence and foreign dangers. There has been a none-too-subtle
superiority complex in the way the British media has treated
perceived Portuguese police inadequacies. Now that the British police
are involved, we may feel, real progress is being made. On May 17, UK
detectives reviewing the case said they had identified “a number of
persons of interest”.
All of this in no way
excuses or indeed explains why the McCanns have been treated so
shabbily by sections of the press. In 2008 they received £550,000
libel damages and front-page apologies from Express Newspapers over
allegations they were responsible for Madeleine’s death. The
Leveson report stated that Express appetite for news of Madeleine was
“insatiable” with the search for the truth “the first principle
to be sacrificed”. Kate McCann told the enquiry that when the News
of the World published her diaries without permission she felt
“mentally raped” and “violated”.
It will be interesting to
see if, in this post-Leveson world, the attitude and behaviour of the
British press is any different. The publicity generated by next
week’s Crimewatch will be a test of that, if nothing else.
Six years on, what’s driving the obsession with Madeleine McCann?
Mick Hume - Spiked - 15.10.2013
Here are the news
headlines. Madeleine McCann is still missing. In a new Crimewatch
special, the BBC has exclusively reported that Madeleine McCann has
not been found, six-and-a-half years after the young British girl
disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz,
Portugal. Her parents remain heartbroken. In other developments,
the team of Metropolitan Police detectives now running the
high-profile re-investigation of the British three-year-old’s
disappearance have announced that they still have no real information
about what happened to her. The police have also released new e-fit
pictures of a man – brown hair, average build, aged 20-40 – they
say they ‘urgently’ want to question. These images were first
created five years ago….
Where is the news? What
practical difference can any of this make? It is not too difficult to
feel somewhat cynical about the apparent British obsession with
Madeleine. Her case has rarely been out of the headlines since she
disappeared in May 2007, with every sighting of a blonde child
anywhere in the world seemingly reported as a ‘new lead’ before
quietly being dropped. Her parents have become prominent public
figures, appearing everywhere from the Vatican to the Leveson
Inquiry. This week, Madeleine is once more all over the media, after
the BBC Crimewatch special on the Met investigation that was plugged
as a ‘breaking news story’ for the past week.
Yet throughout all of
this, there has been no discernible advance in the actual
investigation, no hard new evidence at all to sustain or explain the
neverending story. In Portugal, where the disappearance and suspected
abduction occurred, media reports and vox pops show widespread
bewilderment at the continued British focus on the events of one
evening six-and-a-half years ago. The Portuguese police have long
since concluded what many feel but are reluctant to say: that she is
most probably dead, and died on the day she went missing. In Britain, too, some
have now started to criticise what they see, with some justification,
as the ongoing media ‘circus’ surrounding the case. But they have
trouble answering the question: why Madeleine?
One shallow attempt at an
explanation is to claim it is down to her middle-class professional
parents and their media-savvy advisers – ‘Team McCann’ – who
have spun the story so successfully. (If that were true, it would
hardly be a scandal; if anybody has a reason to remain preoccupied
with the case it is of course Kate and Gerry McCann.) Another cheap
shot is, inevitably, to blame ‘tabloid sensationalism’ for
keeping Madeleine in the headlines. That avoids the fact that the
liberal ‘serious’ media has played a central part in promoting
the circus from the start, as illustrated by the BBC clearing its
schedules and news bulletins to re-promote the story this week. There’s far more going
on here than Team McCann’s spinning skills or morbid tabloid
sensationalism. That would hardly explain how so many, from Downing
Street and Fleet Street to Scotland Yard and across social-media
websites, have apparently remained in thrall to the drama all of this
time. Madeleine has been turned into a symbol, a sort of metaphor, of
several trends in our society and culture.
Almost from the first, it
was clear to some of us that there were two girls involved here.
There was the real Madeleine McCann, the subject of the fruitless
police investigation in Portugal. And then there was ‘Our Maddie’,
a media creation with a name dreamt up by headline-writers but not
recognised by her family mum. Over time, the imaginary ‘Maddie’ has
taken over the story. The latest high-profile Metropolitan Police
probe, with its vague theories and probably useless e-fits, looks
less like a practical criminal investigation to find out what
physically happened to Madeleine than a public-relations exercise,
promoted by the BBC, to demonstrate that the British authorities and
the public still care about Our Maddie. This has become an
ongoing focus for many in search of some sort of Shared Emotional
Experience in the UK today. Ours is an increasingly atomised society,
where old common traditions such as patriotism or religion have
little hold and it has become rare to feel part of something larger
than oneself. As a substitute, over the past two decades we have
witnessed periodic national outbreaks of a sense of shared ersatz
grief and loss around deaths and tragedies.
Most such outbreaks of
‘mourning sickness’ prove fairly short-lived; even the cult of
Princess Diana appears to have lost its charm. But, perhaps because
of her uncertain fate, ‘Maddie’ has become a peculiarly permanent
excuse for indulging in a Shared Emotional Experience. After her
disappearance, this led to many thousands of British households
putting newspaper posters about the missing Madeleine in their
windows, and football crowds and teams displaying her image, in a way
that could have nothing to do with the real police investigation.
Today it explains why the BBC Crimewatch special, scripted by the
Met, was shown in primetime in the UK, not in Portugal. The police
announced with delight that the response of the British public has
been ‘overwhelming’. The response is likely to have a lot more to
do with emotionalism than new evidence. Feeding into this is the
way that ‘Maddie’ has been turned into the poster girl of the
UK’s burgeoning child-protection industry. A society in which many
feel vulnerable and victimised by uncontrollable forces has become
obsessed with the dangers facing our children. As Frank Furedi
recently analysed on Spiked, the defenceless child has become the
all-purpose symbol of human frailty. And what more emotive symbol of
vulnerability could there be than that of a three-year-old apparently
taken from her bed while her parents dined nearby? Emphasising
victimhood is the way that campaigners on all manner of issues claim
moral authority today – which helps to explain why the McCanns have
featured so prominently in the crusade to tame and sanitise the
tabloid press.
All of these cultural
trends around Maddie have been given shape and strength by the
intervention of powerful institutions. The media, from the highbrow
BBC to the redtop newspapers, have taken every opportunity to keep
the circus on the road, in the hope of making an emotional connection
with their audience. The Metropolitan Police, damaged of late by
assorted scandals, have seized the chance to turn the Search for
Madeleine into an image-polishing PR exercise, a rare opportunity to
emphasise their sensitivity and professionalism in contrast to their
Portuguese counterparts. The police have been more spinning than
spun. Whether they can have any more hope than the Portuguese of
solving the case seems almost beside the point. And never far away is the
political class, which can see the emotional tragedy of Our Maddie as
a chance to unite the nation – something they can no longer achieve
with politics or even wars. Thus New Labour prime minister Gordon
Brown gave the McCanns government backing from the first, embracing
them and helping to set up their widely publicised meeting with Pope
Benedict in 2007. And soon after he replaced Brown, Tory prime
minister David Cameron effectively ordered the Met to devote their
stretched resources to a full-scale re-investigation of the case in
Portugal – the sort of political intervention in dictating police
priorities that would normally cause a stir, but the Opposition did
not want to be seen questioning Cameron here.
There can be few who
still seriously expect the story of Madeleine to have a happy ending.
In fact, with so little practical progress, and so much cultural
baggage now attached to the tragedy, there seems little immediate
prospect of it having an ending at all.
Roma in the tabloid crosshairs over‘blonde angels’ - 24.10.2013
John Jewell* - The Conversation
It was inevitable, after
the publicity surrounding the BBC’s recent Crimewatch appeal, that
the Madeleine McCann story would regain currency. Speculation about
the identity of her abductor has of course been a feature of the
narrative since 2007. In 2010, the Daily Mail reported that a British
woman in the Algarve was “100% certain” she had seen Madeleine
dragged away by a “fat gypsy woman” and in 2011 British
detectives went to Spain to investigate claims Madeleine was taken by
gypsy child traffickers.
We must bear this in mind
when we consider why, in the past week or so, we have seen stories
about the alleged abduction of young girls by people belonging to the
Roma community. In Greece a couple has been imprisoned, awaiting
trial for the suspected kidnapping of a “blonde haired, blue eyed
girl” called Maria. The Daily Star’s front page on Friday was in
no doubt – “Maddie found in Greece: new hope as stolen girl turns
up safe at gypsy camp”. In Ireland, meanwhile, another blonde girl,
aged about seven, was taken from her Dublin home by police on Monday
only to be returned yesterday, after DNA tests proved that she was
indeed a member of her family. A two-year-old boy taken from a Roma
couple in Athlone, County Westmeath, was also returned after DNA
tests.
It is far too early to
say whether the arrests in Greece have uncovered instances of
abduction or whether they are evidence of child trafficking, but what
we can say with some certainty is that the old myths and stereotypes
about the Roma and child abduction have resurfaced – if they ever
went away.
Age-old prejudice
In western European
culture gypsies have long been seen as a threat. They are outsiders
who live on the margins of society, unwilling to abide by the rules
of decency with a flagrant disrespect for law and order. They prey on
the vulnerable, the needy and the young. More often than not they are
dirty and exotic at the same time. Simply put, they are the
traditional opposition to the dominant cultural norms. Their
stereotypes exist to reinforce the normalcy of the society to which
they don’t belong.
Sections of the British
press have invoked the gypsy peril for many years. In the coverage of
EU enlargement in 2004 the Express reported that gypsy hordes were
heading to the UK. We were told:
This most repressed
of people see Britain as some sort of promised land where all their
prayers will be answered. To them, Britain’s economy … can easily
sustain gypsy families where eight children are not uncommon … In
Slovakia there are signs that the country is giving its estimated
500,000 Roma gypsies every encouragement to go.
In 2007, Mike Jempson of
the Mediawise trust pointed out that on one day in 1997 the major
daily newspapers – all of them – had front page headlines which
were alarmist, inaccurate and, at best, thoughtless. On Monday,
October 20 1997, the Sun proclaimed: “3,000 gypsies head for
England.” The Mail ran with the “Dover deluge” and the Guardian
led with “Resentment as ‘invasion’ continues”.
The recent abduction
narratives have continued in the usual “us and them” vein. It was
the Greek media that dubbed Maria the “blonde angel”, a motif
readily adopted by the British tabloids. Here we are meant to
contrast the blonde angel with dark devils who took her. Binary
oppositions, good versus evil. The myths and superstitions through
the ages can explicitly be reiterated despite there being no
conclusive evidence – yet – of abduction. The Daily Mail stated
on Tuesday: “Interpol say four-year-old ‘Maria’ found living in
a Greek Roman camp is not on their missing persons list”, while the
accompanying pictures show guns, drugs, balaclavas and chainsaws
seized from Roma properties. Not, you will note, from the property of
the couple held under suspicion.
This week, the Daily
Mirror highlighted the “otherness” of this community living
outside our laws. In relation to events in Dublin, the headline
reads: “Second blonde girl seized from gypsy family in Ireland
‘looks nothing like siblings and speaks much better English’.”
This despite the fact that at the time of the Mirror story the family
was insisting that the child is theirs and the DNA test results had
not yet been revealed. In other words, there was nothing to suggest
that this girl was not a family member other than the fact that she
was different in looks.
When news began to emerge
later that that DNA tests had actually proved the Roma parentage of
the little girl, and she was returned to the home from which she had
been taken, it was of little comfort to the family. The Independent
quoted the 18-year-old sister who said: “She is very traumatised.
They took her just because she has blue eyes and blonde hair. If you
go over to Romania, most people have blue eyes as well.”
At least Channel 4 news
has sought to bring some balance to the coverage. Katherine Quarmby,
author of No Place to Call Home, said the guilt of the Greek Roma
family was yet to be established and it was impossible to speculate
about a large-scale “problem with [Roma] families across Europe
snatching children” based on a small number of cases.
The continued
stigmatisation of the Roma, unfortunately, appears to be a feature of
European culture. In 2009, the European Agency for Fundamental Human
Rights reported on the discrimination and victimisation experienced
by the Roma. Of all the groups surveyed the Roma emerged as the group
most vulnerable to discrimination and crime. More recently, in
September France came under criticism from the European Commission
after its top security official said that Roma migrants had a “duty
to return to their homeland”. Amnesty International said more than
10,000 Roma had been forcibly removed from French squatter camps and
many were forced to return home to Romania and Bulgaria, despite EU
rules requiring free movement for all EU citizens.
I’ve written elsewhere
that the relationship between public opinion and media coverage is a
complex one and what is evident from various studies of coverage of
the Roma is that people are presented with coverage that is one
dimensional, repetitive and alarmist. Channel 4 news on Tuesday
[cited the
evidence](http://www.channel4.com/news/maria-roma-blonde-girl-gypsy-abduction-investigation](http://www.channel4.com/news/maria-roma-blonde-girl-gypsy-abduction-investigation)
given by the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain to the Leveson
enquiry and it is worth quoting in full:
The Met Police
claimed that 1,000 Roma children had been trafficked and forced to
commit street crime in the UK. As a result of this £1.5m European
operation … 130 Roma were arrested in the UK. Of these only 12 were
charged with an offence and eight were convicted of benefit fraud and
related offences. The ‘trafficked’ children were with their
parents, of whom none were convicted of trafficking. Met Police press
releases built an illusion that child trafficking was common among
Roma.
In light of which, it’s
probably no wonder the British tabloids behave the way they do.
*Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University.
