Tuesday, November 11, 2008 

Clarence Mitchell bursts Paul Dacre's bubble.

Notable in Dacre's speech on Sunday was the absence of a mention of the name Madeleine McCann. After all, little Maddie has been undoubtedly the biggest story of the last year, and only since the summer and the apparent evaporation of any remaining leads, alongside the unfortunate legal actions launched against all of the tabloid titles, but especially the Express and Star, has apparent gravy train come to an abrupt halt. He did however praise the brilliance of Fleet Street, while condemning those, especially in the malevolent liberal media, who do so much to do down our superb popular press:

Now, in these difficult times, is the time to celebrate that light.

 For all their many imperfections, British papers – which are full of journalists who work extraordinarily long and difficult hours, often on very low salaries – do a pretty good job, which is why I suspect there is much less corruption in this country than in Europe. In a world of Mandelsons hobnobbing with dubious Russian oligarchs on luxury yachts, Campbells making up dossiers on which we went to war, and of a rampant centralising state that year by year seems intent on eroding basic civil liberties, newspapers are the only brakes on the increasingly arrogant – and, in the case of the EU, unaccountable – behaviour of our ruling classes.

...

Let’s be proud of our industry. Let’s stop this drip, drip, drip of self-denigration. Stand up for the illumination at the top of the lamp post.

Yesterday Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for the McCanns, had his say on this "illumination at the top of the lamp post" at the same Society of Editors conference:

"The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.

...

"However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough.

"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases.

"This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."


We shouldn't however blame these self-same journalists though, as it was, as Mitchell went on, their editors whom were making the demands of them (although kicking the likes of Lori Campbell is surely somewhat deserved):

"I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added.

"I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."

Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."


Undoubtedly Mitchell is referring primarily to the Express, which had decided that Madeleine should be the front page story regardless of other news or whether there had been any developments, but the demands being made of hacks was undoubtedly much the same across the "popular" press.

The reason why Dacre dared not mention the McCanns is because the tabloid coverage of her disappearance was a masterclass in what journalism should not be, but what Dacre believes sells: empty, soulless emotional pornography, crass xenophobia, rampant ignorance, offset by leaping to conclusions on the slightest of new information, casual pointing of the finger of blame, and depending on your publication, either knee-jerk defence of the McCanns or equally knee-jerk accusations that they were fully responsible, all due to the fact that they knew this stuff was selling, with very little care, except for the McCanns themselves in some quarters, for what this coverage was doing to real lives and real people. The legal payouts have been chicken-feed to what they most likely made, not necessarily in putting on sales, but in ensuring that the sales stayed mostly on the same level as the year before, which in the current conditions is a major success. And they still honestly try to claim that they have ethics, or morals, or that unelected, unrepresentative judges are more of a threat than they are.

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11/11/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, July 17, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part three.

Robert Murat got his day in court and £600,000 in damages, but even he must be wondering whether it will change the way that the tabloid press in this country operates. Looking at the Sun and Daily Mail websites tonight, neither has mentioned the settlement announced in the high court. The only mention the Sun has made of any sort of settlement being reached is contained in a "Staff Reporter" story from Tuesday which doesn't mention that the Sun itself or the News of the World have agreed to pay him damages.

With damages to Murat of £600,000, six figure payouts to two of his acquaintances whose names were also dragged through the mud, and overall legal costs, Roy Greenslade estimates that it will have cost the four groups, Express Newspapers, the Mirror Group, Associated Newspapers and News International in the region of £100,000 per paper. Again, in the long run, we're talking of peanuts here. These are still peanuts which will have to be accounted for, and who knows, some employees may well lose their jobs as a result of the costs. That won't however stop any one of these newspapers from smearing individuals in exactly the same way as they did Murat. As elucidated before, it's far too profitable and the negatives are too few to make them think twice before declaring on their front pages that a man is a paedophile or that a missing girl DEFINITELY WAS in that man's villa.

Greenslade mentions that the dedicated legal teams on each paper has to take some of the blame. I'd agree, but I think the real blame lies with one individual only: the editor. They are the ones who decide what and what isn't ultimately printed, and each one in this instance thought that it was perfectly acceptable to print libel about a man whose only crime was wanting to help the police find the little girl that had gone missing close to where he lived. Here then is a roll call of shame: Rebekah Wade; the Sun. Colin Myler; News of the World. Paul Dacre; Daily Mail. Veronica Wadley; Evening Standard. Kenny Campbell; Metro. Richard Wallace; Daily Mirror. Tina Weaver; Sunday Mirror. Bruce Waddell; Daily Record. Peter Hill; Daily Express. Martin Townsend; Sunday Express. Dawn Neesom; Daily Star.

The other main reason why this will have no effect whatsoever on it happening again is that the newspapers have hardly even acknowledged that they've done anything wrong. The only way to make anyone take notice on these occasions when such repeated and hysterical libel has been committed is for the newspaper to be forced to print the apology on its front page, like the Express and Star both did after the action by the McCanns. Having seen the Daily Mirror and Sun front pages tomorrow, neither so much as mentions Murat. The Sun even has a story claiming that the McCanns are about to be cleared, just to rub it into Murat that he'd have more luck trying to get blood out of a stone than forcing a tabloid newspaper to own up to its errors.

If anything therefore ought to put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of self-regulation this ought to be it. Tina Weaver for example sits on the Press Complaint Commission's main board which decides on the cases brought before it for adjudication, while Paul Dacre is the chairman of the code committee! Digitagit summed it up very nicely in the comments on another Greenslade piece:

As with the Mosley case, the toxic combination of greed, vanity, self-importance, affected outrage and false morality is a trait common to all our popular press and is just repulsive beyond belief.

Indeed. These self-same newspapers preach at us day in and day out about law and order, respect and morals, and when it comes down to it, they are just as guilty if not more so than anyone else in society. Only a complaints body with genuine teeth, that could perhaps stop a newspaper from publishing for one day when they commit such outrageous libel, or which personally fines editors or proprietors like Ofcom does could potentially stop this rot.

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7/17/2008 10:42:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part two.

If the payout to the McCanns by the Express group over repeated, completely untrue allegations, not just about their "involvement" in the abduction of their own child but also about their sex lives was embarrassing, then the truly unprecedented payout to Robert Murat by not just the Express papers but every single one of the daily tabloids with the exception of the Daily Sport, three of the Sunday tabloids and also the Scotsman is an indictment of a journalistic culture that regards the lives of those who are being written about as being of no concern whatsoever.

After the apology and payola for the McCanns, Murat's chances of a settlement were always going to be greatly increased. While the McCanns settled on going after the Express because of its clear for all to see race to the bottom, by far the most egregious offender against them, Murat was smeared by all and sundry, leaping to the most lurid conclusions based on the tiniest glimpses of so-called evidence. The Sun, for example, claimed that his computer had child pornography on it, and that he looked at various other questionable sexual websites; that Murat has since had his computers returned to him and no action has been taken for possession of child pornography suggests that these allegations were completely groundless. Anything that might suggest he was in any way strange or abnormal was also seized upon, such as the apparent fact that he joined in with children when his former employers hired a bouncy castle, or that he had been "in a hurry" when hiring a car. The Sun (again) even aired allegations it knew to be completely false, quoting a taxi driver who said that he had driven Murat, who had Madeleine with him on the night she went missing. That this couldn't have been possible because Madeleine had not disappeared at the time he claimed to have driven them didn't stop the paper from printing such abject garbage.

The award for starting the entire ball rolling though has to go to the Sunday Mirror and their reporter Lori Campbell. As Private Eye noted at the time, the paper already had form, having carried an interview the December before with a man called Tom Stephens, who had known some of the prostitutes murdered in and around Ipswich. The police swooped on this clearly distraught individual and swiftly released him after it became completely clear he had no involvement whatsoever with their deaths, distracting the investigation from the real quarry, Steve Wright. Campbell, with a heightened sense of what's creepy and what's not, decided that Murat's behaviour was akin to that of Ian Huntley's after the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and noblely reported her suspicions to the police: "[G]iven the unimaginable horrors which Madeleine's parents were enduring, it seemed the very least I could do," she said at the time. Murat's real crime it seems was not to have tried to get away from Praia da Luz, as you might expect someone involved in the kidnap of a child from the area to do, but instead to stay and help. Indeed, Murat had been helping the police with translating. For his concern about the missing child, he was treated to the finest which the British press has to offer. Lori Campbell meanwhile was nominated for Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Roy Greenslade has outlined three reasons for why this story has so revealed the British tabloids' true colours, lest they really needed exposing anyway: firstly, because this was happening in Portugal, hence they thought they could get away with pushing their coverage further towards the line than they could if this had occurred on British shores. This was undoubtedly a factor, but what also influenced their reporting what that they felt that they could simply get away with it in any case. Without the Express group going too far over the McCanns themselves, Murat would have almost certainly failed in bringing any sort of action. In an interview with the BBC he said his own savings had gone; his mother's were also beginning to dwindle, reducing his chances of bringing an expensive action down to almost nil. As it was, if the McCanns could get some sort of settlement, Murat almost certainly could also, and the firm acting for him, Simons Muirhead and Burton already act pro bono on human rights case. Whether they'll be waiving their fee in Murat's case is unclear.

What's more, it was financially viable in any case for the papers responsible to do so. Murat may receive £550,000 damages; split that 11 ways and it adds up to just £50,000 a newspaper, which to the Daily Mail and Sun especially is absolute peanuts. They've had a year of fun, boosted their circulations, brought in far more than that through their race to the bottom, competing with each other as to who could print the more lurid stories, and at the end of it they have to cough up a whole £50,000? To spout a cliche, they literally must be laughing all the way to the bank. Sure, it's embarrassing that they're going to have to apologise, although it's not clear whether the apologies will be front page specials like the Express's ones to the McCanns were, but has it any way affected the Express or Star in the long term? Of course not. They're still printing the same old crap as they were previously, and if a few readers take umbrage, that's a casualty of the game. This time round those disgusted by the tabloid's behaviour can't even switch to a different rag to show their displeasure: all of them were at it (unless they switch to a broadsheet, which is unlikely). A man's life and his subsequent employability doesn't matter one jot to the editors, the journalists responsible or the owners and shareholders; if it did, there would been grovelling apologies and payouts to Colin Stagg, completely ruined by the press campaign against him. He is instead being compensated by the state, when it should have been editors who demand law and order and tough penalties for everyone other than themselves who paid up.

Greenslade's final reason for why this occurred is that the press has been pushing against the contempt laws in this country for years, and that is undisputably the case. He's missed out a fourth, and most important reason though: churnalism. The whole Madeleine McCann disappearance fits entirely into Nick Davies' rules of production, the very first of which is run cheap stories. This might have taken place in Portugal, and so have had higher costs than cheap stories over here, but these were easily recouped by rises in circulation. In fact, journalists didn't have to necessarily even be in Praia da Luz, where nothing much happened anyway. The Express, for instance, spent most of its time copying out of the local Portuguese press, which was just as guilty, if not more so of printing complete garbage. Secondly, once the ball was rolling, it had to keep on going, meaning journalists had to come up with something even if there was nothing new to report. To suggest that complete fabrication in some cases did not take place would surely be a naive statement. This also inspires ninja turtle syndrome, where if one paper is printing it, the others have to regardless of its veracity.

I wrote after the payout to the McCanns that it changed absolutely nothing, and neither will this latest admittance that they went too far. The benefits of doing so are too large while the penalties are so few and so weak; Murat was very lucky, while the newspapers this time round were unfortunate. The libel system, and indeed, the Press Complaints Commission were drawn and set up not to protect the genuinely little people who find themselves in the crossfire through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were drawn up to protect the rich and the famous and the newspapers themselves respectively. The PCC is utterly toothless while the libel laws are now rightly being described as a worldwide disgrace. The vested interests and industry standards are so vast however that any change is simply unconsciousable, whether by politicians or those within the organisations themselves. Only when the public themselves actually stop buying the despicable rags will they be forced to change their ways. They show no signs of doing that.

Related:
Enemies of Reason - Murat & libel

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7/15/2008 10:28:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals.

If the tabloid press in this country has had a worse collective day than Wednesday the 19th of March 2008, then it was a hell of a long time ago. Not only did the McCanns receive the most craven, sycophantic, crawling, boot-kissing, pathetic front-page apology from both the Daily Express and Daily Star, with the weekend papers to run the same on Sunday, something which is unprecedented and a new low for journalistic standards in this country, but the Daily Mail has also had to make a libel payout to the US billionaire Sheldon Adelson, which with costs from a three-year court battle could add up to the Mail having to sell out £4 million, while the Mail's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, has similarly had to make a front-page "apology/clarification" to the organisers of last summer's climate camp near Heathrow, for over-egging a story about the direct action which some of the protesters planned.

Actually, the latter part there is the Press Complaints Commission's judgement on the matter (website seems to be currently offline, otherwise I'd link to the adjudication. Update: adjudication is here). If the PCC wasn't such a toothless organisation packed to the rafters with the self-same editors of the national newspapers which are complained about on its board, with Peter Hill, editor of the Express currently on the panel, then it would have made clear that the Evening Standard article and indeed most of the tabloid coverage (and apart from the Guardian and Independent, also the broadsheet coverage) of last summer's climate camp were the most baseless smears, lies and scaremongering about the protesters' intentions and tactics. Unlike the Express that rolled over and played dead, the Evening Standard was still last week denying that its article was by any means inaccurate, with the paper's managing editor Doug Willis using the Guardian's response column to dispute George Monbiot's careful evisceration of the Evening Standard story, a taking-apart which even the PCC today endorsed. The damage though has long ago been done; the other newspapers took the story on, in a perfect example of Nick Davies' ninja turtle syndrome rule of production, while everyone has long forgotten about the protest itself. Justice cannot be said to have been done.

The McCanns picked on the Express/Star out of the sea of tabloids that ran very similar stories about them for two reasons: firstly because the Express and Star were the worst, most consistent offenders, day after day running MADELEINE front pages, with the Star in two truly shocking stories alleging firstly that they had sold Madeleine, and secondly that the two of them were involved in wife-swapping/orgy parties, without even the slightest smidgen of evidence to back up either; and secondly because they were also the easiest target. Can you seriously imagine Associated Newspapers or News International under Murdoch capitulating without even the slightest fight? Make no mistake, regardless of their chances of winning, they would have taken the battle all the way and strung it out for as long as possible. No, the Express and Star were the easiest to pick-off, newspapers cut to the bone by a predatory, repulsive proprietor not interested in the slightest in their history, only out to make huge amounts of money while destroying any reputation they had remaining in the process. £550,000 after all is peanuts to Richard Desmond, who has previously paid himself largesse in excess of £45m for a year's helming of his businesses. This was a warning shot across the bows to all the other tabloids, saying "you're next" if you keep it up.

Purely and simply, the Express' and Star's decision to keep publishing was based on two factors: churnalism and greed. The Guardian (which has gone to town on the payout, producing a leader on it, something that none of the tabloid press which would usually crow about their rival's downfall will do) is reporting that the decision on the Express to keep splashing on the Madeleine story was, in the words of Express hacks themselves, down to marketing. Rather than any intrinsic news values, which had long since departed Praia da Luz, the Express kept on and on because surveys showed that some fucked-up self-hating worms keep devouring the stuff. They didn't to such an extent that the newspaper actually made an increase in sales month-on-month, as the ABCs lay witness to, but it did halt the decline year-on-year; in October the Express was up by 0.15%, and the same was true in November, where it remarkably sold the exact same number of copies as it did the previous year. Only in December did the decline again accelerate, with the stories starting to dry up altogether. These stories were cheap, either copied out of the Spanish or Portuguese press or made up entirely; nasty; and they sold well, all the fundamentals that so underpin churnalism. Some in the industry have remarked that it's amazing that the Express and Star still manage to put out a newspaper, let alone have time to do such things as check facts or properly investigate and verify stories, so although this was a wilful assault on a couple who had lost their child, it was only a matter of time before something similar happened regardless of Desmond's greed.

The Express's fatal mistake was that it went too far and did so too often. Rather than simply blaming the McCanns for their daughter's apparent abduction, something that Allison Pearson did last week when she attacked Fiona MacKeown and placed the blame for her daughter's death on her and not on her actual killer, it instead went for invention and slander. As Davies relates in the chapter on the Daily Mail in Flat Earth News, the Daily Mail knows in general just how far to take its hatchet jobs, making it clear where the blame really lies, or on who is the real offender rather than a victim, but without libelling anyone, or at least anyone who has the money to sue or to dedicate time to putting a prolonged complaint through the Press Complaints Commission. When it does do so, it has the collateral behind it to pay out any damages without so much as a wince, although today's £4 million might make it suffer slightly more than usual. Hence Colin Stagg slandered for years in the Mail will only receive compensation from the government and not from the gutter press, nor has he ever received an apology from them for their 10 years' worth of lies and implications that he killed Rachel Nickell. Robert Murat, slandered, smeared and libelled in a similar fashion to the McCanns, is also unlikely to receive any similar payout, and he, rather than being thought of as a suspect initially by the police, was first targeted by the Sunday Mirror's Lori Campbell, who remembered Ian Huntley and made her suspicions known. Campbell will never have to make a grovelling apology to Murat; instead she's been nominated for Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards!

Fundamentally however, nothing that has happened today will change the Street of Shame in the slightest. The Express and Star, cut to the bone, pushed their luck too far and chose the wrong grieving couple to attack; had they done similar to Fiona MacKeown or the parents of Shannon Matthews, which the Star today splashes on, then they would most likely have got away with it. MacKeown or the Matthews won't be able to either afford Carter-Fuck or persuade them to represent them pro bono for similar actions, and so if they wanted to complain would have to go through the PCC, where their chances would be slight to non-existent. The Mail, although stung by the damages and costs, will be printing exactly the same things as they did about Sheldon Adelson tomorrow, and will do until the end of time or people finally stop buying the vile rag. The Evening Standard, although forced to apologise, has had no financial sanction put on it, and the incident will be forgotten within days. It'll be free to smear and attack the next grassroots protest movement that comes along, just as its stable-mates have done before and will do so again. This is the system, which according to John Whittingdale, the chair of culture, media and sport select committee has "worked". He is of course right. The system, which was set-up to protect both the press themselves and those with the money to defend themselves, has indeed worked. For everyone else, they're just as screwed as ever.

Related post:
Enemies of Reason - Is it a victory? No, it's a defeat

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3/19/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, October 27, 2007 

The Madeleine circus rolls on.

I keep promising myself that I won't write any more posts on the McCann saga - and then I very quickly find I break those personal bonds. This isn't going to be overly long, although if this longest, most drawn-out of sensationalist crime stories doesn't run out of steam prior to Christmas, it might well only be prudent to suggest that it may merit a review in full at years' end.

The one thing that does appear to be self-evident now is that the sympathy for the McCanns is slowly ebbing away. This isn't necessarily due to the fact that they are almost certainly the only realistic suspects in the disappearance of their daughter, but more likely just through the general fatigue of the sight of both them and Madeleine, staring out at you whenever you enter the newsagent. I'm sick of seeing all of them, sick of reading the confabulated nonsense being concocted on a daily basis by men and women who are an insult to the definition of journalist, and continuously disgusted by the duplicity of the media in its role in first defending the couple from even the slightest of suggestions that they could have been involved and now in routinely damning them and drawing on the most basest of sources, especially those who seem to be eager to be paid for their lack of insight.

You can't just blame the media themselves though - the McCanns' use and now relationship with it has been a disaster from the beginning. They simply haven't managed to get the balance right, just as the press itself hasn't. Granted, you can't damn them too much for not understanding how the feral beasts operate, and their initial approach, in getting as much coverage as they possibly could in the hope that Madeleine would quickly be found if they got her image transmitted across the globe, was probably a risk worth taking. It always however threatened to drive a potential kidnapper to ground, locking Madeleine away where she would never be discovered, or into panicking and to use an unpleasant euphemism, disposing of her. Their subsequent appointment of a spokesman who is, as commentators have pointed out, little more than a spin doctor of the most oleaginous kind, has also thoroughly backfired.

The tabloid media as a whole has delighted in using the story to their own advantage. The faux empathy verging on emotional pornography which radiated from the coverage at the beginning quickly turned to the News of the World and Scum sponsoring huge billboards, posters and t-shirts with their own logo adorned all over them. Celebrities pledged money, their jets, and even inserts in their books. The "bungling" of the Portuguese police supposedly highlighted by the tabloids, often verging on xenophobia, only seemingly resulted in them increasing their briefings to their home media, who in turn denounced the British press and increasingly turned on the McCanns themselves. I watched last week's Dispatches documentary while away, which sent "five of the UK's best-qualified criminal investigators" to Praia da Luz to investigate all the leads, and while a couple were critical of the initial inadequacies of the search around the resort, the level of invective towards the investigation by the local police was notable only by its absence. By far the most revolting development though has been the Daily Express, the worst of the tabloid mentality summed up in a single paper, where Madeleine has not now been absent from the front page for months, the concept of making money out of collective misery far too good an opportunity to miss for Richard Desmond, a pornographer who last year paid himself £40m.

While I have never sought to pass any guilt on the McCanns themselves, either for leaving their children alone while they went out to dine, or for being possibly involved in their own daughter's disappearance, I'm fairly certain that all of us were aware from the beginning of how rare abductions of children from their own homes are: kidnapping whilst on holiday is next to unheard for. As the days, weeks and months have passed, with all the leads apparently drying up, the suspicion was always going to pass onto themselves. I genuinely hope they are innocent, mainly for their own sake. The best thing they could do now though is to completely step back from the limelight, sack Clarence Mitchell and make it clear to the press that they will be making no further comments whatsoever until any new leads turn up. They can still fund their own investigations into their daughter's disappearance, as they seem to be doing, but their own presence in the coverage is only exacerbating the increasingly chilly public mood towards them. At the moment, as perverse as it is, they're only encouraging the mentality which is leading the tabloids to sink even lower than they ever have before: the Daily Mail's current online poll is "Do you think Kate McCann's tears were genuine?", (other polls include is Nigella Lawson getting too fat and Has Strictly Come Dancing become too competitive) and the current results are perhaps indicative, 49% saying yes and 51% saying no. The media is foul enough without having to cover yourself in shit whilst utilising it.

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10/27/2007 07:43:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, October 26, 2007 

Lookalike.

Could the "man" the McCanns believe abducted Madeleine have been discovered so soon?



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10/26/2007 07:32:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 

Where in the world is Madeleine McCann?


In what other country would a grainy, out of focus holiday photograph of a woman carrying a child become front page news except in one where the hacks have apparently lost not just all sense of enduring news values, but of all their collective journalistic skills?

Did it not even slightly occur to the editors on not just the four tabloids, but also on the Times and Telegraph, which also used the photograph on their respective front pages that, believe it or not, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of blonde-haired little white girls out there that when not photographed directly are likely to bear a remarkable resemblance to one which has disappeared? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the photograph was taken in Morocco, where after all, the kids shouldn't be white, so there must be something in it.

Cue major surprise then when it turns out that the child, when seen up close, doesn't even look slightly like Madeleine. It's not right to blame the photographer, Clara Torres, for being suspicious though. As Mike Power suggests, the media greatly encourages this sort of thing, and especially when you're either emotionally involved in a case or have been affected by it in some way, you're even more likely to see something that isn't really there. I know this from personal experience: the number of times you think you've seen someone, sometimes only for a couple of seconds and not long enough to be absolutely sure is still enough for you to psychologically conclude that it is that person. Mr Power mentions Lord Lucan as well as his example of another blonde woman, and another case would probably be Richey Edwards, guitarist and lyricist with the Manic Street Preachers, who vanished over 10 years ago but is still regularly sighted and has been spotted as far a field as Lanzarote and Goa, even when the most likely explanation was that he committed suicide by jumping from the Severn bridge, even if his family have not decided to declare him legally dead.

That however is no excuse for newspapers to go weak at the knees when presented with such an unlikely scenario as that presented in the photograph. Is it even slightly conceivable that all those pictured would be in on the abduction of the child, as they would need to have been? It was so piss-weak that even the most naive trainee hack could have shot a dozen holes in it. The Madeleine McCann disappearance now though is not just a news story, it's become a money-making circus. It's hardly been off the front page of the tabloids ever since the McCanns returned from Portugal, even though there have been almost no new leads except for the judge deciding that they didn't have to return as yet for further questioning. Today's jolly jape will make up tomorrow's stories though, so that's that sorted. If it had been the BBC that had been handed the photograph, the tabloids would have ruthlessly attacked it for raising the hopes of the McCanns unnecessarily, while they can tomorrow instead write about how they tracked down the reality of the news story, with a nary a word of apology about their own ignorant lack of a mea culpa. Such is the parasitical nature of the tabloid media in this country, which only seems to get worse over time.

The photograph also kept the far more interesting, important and humanitarian concerns over the Burma crackdown off the front pages of all but the Guardian, Independent and FT, but then monks and citizens fighting for their right to be free of tyranny just doesn't sell as well as laughable photographs of little missing white girls. (Mr E incidentally has a number of links for those wanting to keep up on developments there.)

Slight update: As Mellomeh points out in the comments, and eric the fish also notes, the Mail still has a poll up which even now has 53% of the vote saying that it is Madeleine.

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9/26/2007 08:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 12, 2007 

How to be witless in just over 1000 words.

Not to come over all Alastair Campbell, criticising cartoons, but the one on the fifth page of today's Private Eye (1193), comparing Citizen Kane to "Citizen Journalist", while somewhat true, takes the usual position that all blogging is "witless".

On the same page, the Eye lays into the true witlessness of the summer: the incessant, ignorant, complicit reporting of the Madeleine McCann case. For every useless, highly skippable blog post, you can point to the amount of dead trees used to print the acres of instantly throwaway, endlessly speculating and empty stories that have been haunting the nation. Despite some of the more thoughtful hacks taking a step back, examining just what has happened and why and how they as the media have been involved since the beginning, most of the coverage is still on the level of this abysmal abortion put together by the Mail's latest Glenda Slagg, Allison Pearson:

The past few days of Kate McCann's life may have rewritten the definition of hell.

I don't know: personally, I think I'd rather be in her position than burning for the rest of eternity, forever condemned to listening to Kate Nash's album over and over again while one of Satan's minions' sodomises me with a rusty knife. Each to their own though. Everyone's definition of hell is different; it can't be rewritten every time a tabloid journalist feels the latest situation means it has to be.

Skipping nearly 200 words of how terribly awful and unfair it all is to this unimpeachable couple:
Imagine how thrilled those literally clueless Portuguese cops were to be handed some inconclusive DNA evidence they could talk up to scapegoat the British visitors who had become such a pain in the backside.

Breathtaking, isn't it? The police are dressed up as the villains in Pearson's narrative of woe, rather than simply doing their jobs; the DNA evidence, collected and analysed by the British Forensic Service rather than any nasty clueless foreign types, is inconclusive; and the British visitors are being scapegoated because they'd "become a pain in the backside". Almost all the coverage has treated the McCanns with kid gloves, willingly blind to almost any possibility that they could have been involved, but this kind of myopia could only have been written by someone who's spent the last few days under the American regime of sensory deprivation. Some have accused those who suspect the McCanns of twisting the truth and the reality of what happened; this goes far beyond any of that, seeing an organised conspiracy not just involving the Portuguese authorities but also the British team who've done all the forensic legwork.

Overnight, Gerry and Kate found themselves trapped in a nightmare straight out of Franz Kafka. A world where lack of hard evidence is taken as proof of guilt and innocent explanations are twisted to fit our darkest suspicions.

Pearson perhaps out to reread, or even read for the first time Kafka. The whole point of the Trial is that K. cannot clear his name because he never knows what he's accused of, comes up against a bureaucracy that hinders his every movement towards discovering what it is the case is about, and finds that he is mocked and even more ruthlessly targeted by the authorities for continuing to maintain his innocence. It's a story about the tyranny of everyday life as well as being about the horrors of the totalitarian and unaccountable state. The control order regime is Kafkaesque, where some of those held under what is essentially house arrest never know what it is their meant to have done, and can't as a result fight back and defend themselves; the situation that the McCanns face is nothing of the sort. For someone who's just twisted the events of the last few weeks into a grand conspiracy, it's ever so slightly rich for Pearson to then suggest that the McCanns' innocent explanations are being twisted by some to fit suspicions.

Now Kate and Gerry have been named as official suspects, it suddenly feels as if it's open season on the doctors from Leicestershire.

Really? Unless you count the Desmond papers, which seem to have decided that going with the opposite of the rest of the press might attract a few more readers to their disgusting publications, the press has almost uniformly been completely behind the McCanns. It's only been the internet, predictably, where others have been suggesting otherwise.

In this post-Diana age, people want proof of grief. They don't want dignity or faith or an attempt to keep up appearances, even if you are collapsing inside.

And just who's to blame for this I wonder?

That Gerry and Kate, devoted parents by all accounts, loaded Madeleine's decaying body into the boot of a hire car four weeks later while they were busy courting the international media to help find their child?

Can you credit it? Of course not. The allegation is not just revolting. It is surreal.


Completely unlike the events of the last four months then. Absolutely nothing has made any sense, and it still doesn't. How does someone, within the period of around half an hour go almost completely unnoticed through a bustling holiday resort, manage to get into a locked apartment without leaving almost any prominent clues, take a 3-year-old girl without waking up her brother and sister and carry her off into the dark, never to be seen again, with only a friend of the family seeing a man from behind carrying what appeared to be a child in blankets over his shoulder?

Whatever you may think about the error they made in leaving their children alone that night, these people are not Fred and Rose West.

The deed the McCanns are accused of would have required such black, cold-hearted evil that I refuse to believe they are guilty unless overwhelming evidence is uncovered.


Nonsense. If the McCanns are guilty, and I have no idea, as pointed out before whether they are or not, the most likely explanation seems to be that whatever happened to Madeleine was a tragic accident. Out of self-preservation, probably because they feared losing their two other children as a result, they planned a cover-up, one that was for a few months surprisingly successful. They have probably been completely overwhelmed by the media coverage of the event, as almost everyone else has been. Nothing they've done is evil, or even instantly condemnable; how do we know we wouldn't have done the same thing in their position?

This is the prism through which the tabloids, and some of the other press have to see absolutely everything through. Every murderer is instantly evil, a monster whose actions are eminently unexplainable. One suspects that the media, if the McCanns were to be eventually found guilty, wouldn't vilify them for what they'd done to their daughter, but rather because they had the audacity to play them for fools for so long.

The one point that nearly all the commentators have failed to make, whether because they're unwilling to because of their own role in it or because they quite like their jobs, is that the media has been complicit in this from the very beginning. Everything was staged and created for maximum publicity, the McCanns both using and being used by the media, each out of their own motives. Is it little wonder after all of that they're unwilling to countenance the possibility they could even be slightly involved? It would be the equivalent of admitting that they'd conspired in it all themselves.

So please, spare us the cartoons about the witless blogs. The tabloid press, and especially the commentators within it are the ones currently being exposed as vacuous.

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9/12/2007 07:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, September 10, 2007 

Scum-watch: McCann sycophancy and scummy mummies.

A relatively quick breeze then through today's Scum leader column:

KATE and Gerry McCann must have thought the nightmare couldn’t get worse after their daughter Madeleine vanished.

...

First, there was the apparent lack of interest from the bungling Portuguese police. Then came the vile rumours about them in the local press.

While there could certainly be something to be said about the slow reaction from the Portuguese police in failing to close or notify the Spain/Portugal border, to call it a lack of interest is nothing short of a slur. They conducted searches throughout the area of Praia da Luz, interviewed everyone involved and shortly declared a man to be a suspect. It was only then that the trail went cold, which isn't exactly their fault. The very nature of the McCanns' media campaign could be just as responsible, resulting in the kidnapper going to ground and keeping Madeleine locked away from wherever anyone could see or find her. It was always a difficult decision to make, and we may never know whether it was the right one.

Now, after receiving dubious forensic reports, they are being treated as “suspects” in the case.

Naturally, if this case had involved terrorist suspects, someone accused of abducting a child or almost anyone else in this country, it seems unlikely that the Scum would be referring to forensic reports against them, compiled by the British Forensic Service, as dubious.

No wonder the McCanns were anxious to be back in the bosom of supportive relatives and friends.

But they would be more reassured if detectives in Portugal concentrated on trying to find Maddie.

In their pursuit of the McCanns they seem to have forgotten even to go through the motions of hunting the kidnapper who might still have the four-year-old in his clutches.


Uh, that was what they were doing up until they first apparently started to suspect the McCanns themselves, wasn't it? So believing of the McCanns, not willing to accept for a moment they just might have something to do with Madeleine's disappearance, the Sun's left with trying to accuse the detectives of not continuing the search for her. The reason they're no longer going through the motions appears to be obvious: they no longer think that she has been kidnapped, concluding that she's dead, either at the hands of her parents as the result of an accident or otherwise. It's one thing to accuse them of "bungling"; another to suggest that they've given up completely.

Onwards:

ALL pregnant mums are to get £120 of YOUR money in the hope they will spend it on healthy food.

Christ, MY money? I'm broke as it is!

Yet wealthy “yummy mummies” don’t need the cash, and already put food under the microscope.

“Scummy mummies” at the bottom of the heap will just spend the hand-out on booze and fags.


Lovely. Considering the very fact that the Sun itself is a caricature, it's not exactly surprising that it's using them in such a crude way here. It does however though say something about the Sun itself: a supposed working class publication, one of its biggest hatreds is of its very readers', condemned as "chavs", "yobs", "scroungers", leftie trade union dinosaurs and now as "scummy mummies". The very fact that the paper of choice amongst such people is likely to be the Sun has never entered into it. Even so, it's quite true that Alan Johnson's idea is a complete and utter clusterfuck, an obvious bribe, as others have expanded upon.

It does however bear comparing to another recent bung; the Tories' policy commitment to recognising marriage in the tax system. Both are aimed at achieving similar supposedly laudatory measure, in the case of the "health in pregnancy" grant narrowing the disparity between the rich and poor in health terms, while the Tories' pledge is in encouraging commitment in relationships and promoting the family as a way of tackling Britian's "broken society". Both are also completely spurious arguments, based on politics and narrow interests. The difference is that Labour's is meant to help the poorest: the Tories' on the other hand, despite all the bluster, is so opaque that an 8-year-old could see through it, an open bribe at middle class families already married. It's interesting then to note that while the Sun (and numerous other right-wingers) fully supported the Tories' idea, it completely rejects the Labour one, even though they're both idiotic. Could it be possibly be something to do with which class each is aimed at? No, that couldn't possibly be it; only the left indulges in class warfare.

While the cost to the taxpayer would be £120 for each pregnant woman, the Tories have raised the figure of around a £20 a week saving for married couples. Do the math: that's a lot more money to those who really don't need it courtesy of the fiscally sound Tories than it is from the stealth taxing, wasteful Labour.

As the Scum says:

It is this sort of expensive gimmick that drives taxpayers crazy.

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9/10/2007 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, September 08, 2007 

Still failing to get the balance right.

Witnessing the current rush to defend the McCanns by the vast majority of the British media, it's hard not to think of just how daft they're going to look if they move from being suspects to being charged. The previous biggest reverse ferret in history was the death of Diana; this could yet far surpass it.

From the very beginning, the coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, at first highly manipulative, the equivalent of emotional pornography when there was very little that anyone in this country could do to help, has struck almost entirely the wrong note consistently. The lack of desire to examine any alternative theories, the attacks on the German radio journalist who dared to ask one of the first difficult questions directly of the couple, all of it has been so utterly craven and so completely untypical of this countries' tabloid media. The one supposed saving grace of the tabloid culture is its indefatigability; it is unrestrained, unafraid to think the unthinkable, and uses all of its critical muster, often for ill. Numerous previous cases have shown how it loves to think the very worst: see Colin Stagg, smeared, libeled, pursued and attacked for years until he was finally cleared of all involvement in the murder of Rachel Nickell; Maxine Carr, smeared and attacked for lying for the man she both loved and was in fear of, forced to be given a new identity because of the hate that the tabloids, especially the Sun threw at her; and a paedophile whose former garden was dug up last year after a tip-off, with the Sun screaming about a new "house of horrors", a reference to the bodies buried on the property of Fred and Rosemary West, only for the entire story to completely disappear and never be mentioned again after no human remains were discovered.

All of this has been thrown out of the window when it's come to the McCanns. The unwillingness to think any ill of them whatsoever, and now to treat the Portuguese decision to make both Gerry and Kate suspects as evidence of a plot to fit them up because of the police's own incompetence suggests that many journalists have completely lost the faculty to report the story with any modicum of independence. It's ever so slightly reminiscent of the case of Louise Woodward, also a Brit abroad, who was almost universally held by the tabloids to be innocent, regardless of the merits of the defense or prosecution case.

To call it strange would be by no means overplaying the atmosphere currently prevailing. The mood of the close to six past years in the new age of terror has been to presume guilt until innocence has been proved, as the attitude towards the Kamal family showed. With the McCanns it's been the absolute opposite. It'd be a welcome development if this was shown to all those suspected of crime, but somehow I can't imagine it'll spread. As with everything, there has to be a balance, and it's been as sorely missing as ever.

I have no idea whether the McCanns have anything to do with the disappearance of Madeleine, but to completely discount the possibility, especially in line with the forensic evidence, examined not by the Portuguese police remember but by the Forensic Science Service in this country would be foolhardy, considering the complete lack of any other suspects apart from Robert Murat, himself the victim of heavy speculation to begin with. The so-called feral beasts, when made to decide between a middle-class British couple and a foreign police force, have already made their choice.

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9/08/2007 10:15:00 PM | | | links to this post

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