Matthew Parris Is Feeling Sick Over Madeleine McCann
MATTHEW Parris has followed Anorak on to the Jeremey Vine show on BBC Radio 2 to talk about Madeleine McCann. I was also on Radio 4.
Vine reminds Parris that the story is popular on the internet. But Parris thinks the media can and should turn the volume up and down.
The fact is that ever since the little girl’s sad and horrible disappearance, there has been no news. Nothing has been learnt. Nothing has emerged. Tomorrow, five weeks will have elapsed during which there has been no fact worthy of the name to report.
Yet the story has dominated the news, and several innocent people have been indelibly defamed.
What good has this done? Nobody questions the motives of those who have worked to keep it in the headlines, but the confluence over a protracted period of heavy and continuous news coverage with a complete absence of news ought to prompt some soul-searching. You may say “mystery” is in itself a story, but I’m afraid this is not really a great mystery. There is something faintly but unmistakably sick in this prolonged churning of public sentiment and public fascination.
It gets us back to who sets the news agenda – the audience or the editors? And how in this new media age the readers are beginning to get their voices heard.
Posted: 7th, June 2007 | In: Reviews Comments (36) | TrackBack | Permalink
