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MADDYWATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann

DAILY MIRROR: “MADDY POLICE ‘PROBE ‘FAISCO’”

A letter of appeal from the Portuguese police requesting Kate McCann’s diary, Gerry McCann’s laptop, Madeleine McCann’s Cudle Cat and featuring a list of 100 questions for the “Tapas Seven” has not been sent. The paper says the police forgot to

The official are “bungling”. A “friend” says: “It’s a fiasco”

In Madrid “hundreds” of balloons were released “in honour of Madeleine”. And: “Children also held up pictures of the four-year-old”

Parents look on. Hands are held tighter. It could have been you. What is the purpose of this event? Is this spreading the fear and the anxiety?

THE GUARDIAN: “Before the dust settles - Movie-makers used to wait until news stories were over before moving in. Not any more, writes Peter Bradshaw”

The Madeleine McCann Movie

“Gerry McCann has confirmed that he took a preliminary meeting with a representative from IMG, an entertainment agency associated with the company who made Touching the Void - although these particular film-makers have themselves denied any interest”

Will the film be made?

Asks Bradshaw: “How soon is too soon for a movie based on a news story? Two real events are threatening to transform themselves into celluloid with dizzying speed: the 2006 Securitas robbery in Tonbridge, over which a five-man gang was recently convicted of stealing £53m, and the kidnap of Madeleine McCann in 2007 - for which, of course, no one has been convicted at all”

What kind of film with the McCann movie be?

“If the Securitas film becomes a mockney geezer film, then the McCann film would almost certainly play in another mode entirely: the Enigmatic Deadpan genre. Family dysfunction documentaries such as Capturing the Friedmans and My Kid Could Do That are all the rage, and I wonder if the McCanns quite realise the manner of mysterious neutrality in which they would inevitably be represented? If the film is made now, the McCanns cannot expect any film-maker simply to state that they are innocent. The film would show their day-to-day campaign, and there would be plenty of interviews with them looking uncomfortable, lots of odd silences. There would, I suspect, be no voiceover, just plenty of unanswered questions hanging in the air. And this would not necessarily be in bad faith: without the case being cleared up, no other approach is possible”

ROY GREENSLADE: “The McCanns’ debate: from banality to an outpouring of bile”

Greesnalsde is at the “The McCanns and the media” debate.

Kelvin MacKenzie is speaking: “I was altogether less enamoured with his defence of papers, especially the Express titles, for publishing wildly inaccurate stories. Kelvin’s defence? Newspapers are commercial operations and you must expect them to publish stories calculated to increase sales. The temptation to ramp up circulation was too great to resist. That doesn’t wash with me at all”

Then: “Roger Graef, producer of Channel 4’s Dispatches on the mystery of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, spoke of the surreal, Kafkaesque nature of making a documentary in which there were (and are) no facts and about which no-one has any genuine knowledge, including the Portuguese police”

But he still made a programme about it, nonetheless

In the crowd “The Madeleine Foundation showed a lamentable grasp of debating rules by interrupting speakers and shouting out a string of offensive comments about the McCanns and their PRs… They were the equivalent of those mobs outside courts in murder trials, deaf to facts, cocooned from reality by their own self-righteous demagoguery. Their major aim, outlined in a “manifesto” circulated within the lecture theatre, is to see the McCanns prosecuted for “abandoning” their children”

There is much prejudice in how many view the case of Madeleine McCann. Discuss…

DAILY EXPRESS: “New clue hope on Madeleine”

“Investigators” are “investigating new leads”

The private investigators want to speak with “potential new witnesses”. This, as the “WORLD’S GREATEST NEWSPAPER” reports, is “raising hope of a breakthrough”

How realistic this hope is, the Express does not say. Is everyone the detectives speak with a “potential” new witness? Are you? The Express does not say 

THE SUN: “Maddie cops’ file blunder”- Offcials in Portugal “admitted” thay had failed to send a “key dossier” in the Madeleine McCann case to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. This is so-called “letter of appeal”

But we do not hear any words from the police. How did they admit to their failure? Perhaps they are not yet ready to send the missive?

Madeleine McCann: Nine months of speculation

Posted: 31st, January 2008 | In: Madeleine McCann. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0