Madeleine McCann: Mothers’ Day With Kate McCann And No News

MADELEINE McCann – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann - WITH the media’s Our Maddie now firmly back in the news, can the story be kept going by inviting us to gawp at the parents?

Kate McCann is going to be the star turn on Aled Jones’s BBC Radio 2 Mothering Day special.

The Sun: “Kate’s comfort in Maddie bedroom”

KATE McCann has revealed she seeks strength by visiting missing daughter Madeleine’s bedroom twice a day.

Good that she gets comfort. But why do we need to know this? Why only twice?

During a visit to Lisbon yesterday with husband Gerry to meet their Portuguese lawyer, she said: “We haven’t changed anything. There’s still a lot of pink. I continue to go to Madeleine’s room twice a day. It’s a comforting feeling.”

It’s grim, emotive, repetitive personal stuff made public. It’s voyeurism. We are being invited to stare at the parents. Are you getting off on it. Do you feel? Why is it news?

Gerry McCann is talking with Portuguese daily 24 horas:

“There are several cases, some recent, of missing children that were found. That makes us believe our daughter could be alive and that’s why we continue to have hope.”

Says the Sun:

The 2,000 page dossier covers dozens of possible sightings Portuguese detectives appear to have failed to follow up.

Appear? What happened to those “bungling cops”? What happened to investigative journalism? And what about those files, the ones the McCanns’ spokesman Clarence Mitchell described as “golden”?

Appealing for media organisations with access to the files not to publish further information on possible sightings, Gerry said: “If it was divulged it could be very bad for our private investigators.”

So, having spent three summers keeping us gripped with sightings and tales of Our Maddie, the benchmark for all missing children, we are now to have public records kept from us? We have to trust the private detectives? The private dicks who told us about that Victoria Beckham look-alike in Barcelona?

Remember Judith Aron and Melissa Karlson, two innocents dragged into the story of a missing child?

And Rhonda Whilley.

The detectives who spoke of the boat in Spain and the women in Australia – one of whom was a 53-year-old Victoria beckham looka-like (sorry, Vicky) – who later told us they “believe the answer to the riddle lies within a 10-mile radius of Praia da Luz”?

The detectives we spent a day with?

The one of whom the Mail reported:

The Mail on Sunday, however, has established that members of Mr Edgar’s team who had visited Barcelona:

• Failed to speak to anyone working at the seafood restaurant near where the agitated woman was seen at 2am.
• Failed to ask the port authority about movement of boats around the time Madeleine disappeared.
• Failed to ask if the mystery woman had been filmed on CCTV.
• Knew nothing about the arrival of an Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished until told by British journalists, who gave them the captain’s mobile phone number.
• Failed to interview anyone at a nearby dockside bar where, according to Mr Edgar, the mystery woman was later seen drinking.
• Failed to ask British diplomats in Spain for advice before or during the visit.
Also, Spanish police could not confirm that they had been contacted by the British investigators.

Last night Mr Edgar said: ‘We are not above criticism and I take responsibility for any shortcomings. If somebody has not done what they should have done, that’s my job to deal with that.’

But do not tell anyone about anything any more because:

Isabel Duarte, the McCanns’ Portuguese lawyer, insisted: “Innocent lives including Madeleine’s life itself could be at risk.”

Well, yes. Could. So we need media blackout, then, to keep Our Maddie safe?

But what of the investigation if we have to keep Madeleine’s name in the news? Should we leave no stone unturned? Can Our Maddie be kept on the news agenda by stories of the innocent and pained parents? Are we just to watch the innocent parents?

And if we are, what have the past months and months of awareness-inducing PR-fed stories and exclusives been for if not to keep us all looking?

Madeleine McCann is missing. And all we are doing is watching and listening to the innocent parents…

In other news, Maria Alice dos Santos Silveira, Jorge Vitorino Cabral Martins and Yvone Albino have yet to address the media about what seems to be, in the minds of those private detectives at least, their non-non-suspects status…

Madeleine McCann is missing. Still missing. There are no suspects.

Anorak

Posted: 10th, March 2010 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (8) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink