“If your fridge is full this Christmas, use nature’s refridgerator - your car” - Anthea Tuner on GMTV
Marks & Spencer Bag A Life Campaign
Workers sacked by Dervla Kirwan (6:30 ITV1) and David Jason (7:45 ITV2)
2009: Anorak’s Diary
Obama rising, Gore sinking, Jamie Oliver exported, Beckham chipping, Ledger returning
Terrorists Target Jews Sugar, Winehouse and Ronson: Blair Outraged
UK Jews on and not on terror list
Madeleine McCann: WMDs, Princess Diana, Credit Crunch, England And Bingo
MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, Kate McCann and Gerry McCann
NEW STATESMAN: “The Real McCann Scandal”
What scandal? A child went missing. She is still missing. And that’s it. Although after a year and a half of breathless reporting not all newspapers can agree on where she went missing from.
Brian Catchcart details how the British press set out to systematically destroy the parents of Madeleine McCann.
All the press? Surely not…
You may have missed it: at the High Court in London on 15 October, Express Newspapers agreed to pay £375,000 in libel damages to the so-called “Tapas Seven”, the friends of Kate and Gerry McCann who were with the couple in Portugal when Madeleine McCann disappeared.
Missed it? Who reads the New Statesmen who could have missed that news, it being on every news bulletin? Read about it here.
The Tapas Seven victory, it seems, was treated as a minor footnote to a burned-out story; few people were likely to be interested.
Not on Anorak. But why would the Sangria 7 be a big splashy story? A child is missing and libelling the friends of the parents is not the main story, is it? The story, such as it is, is about a missing child.
Well, they ought to be interested, because the McCann case was the greatest scandal in our news media in at least a decade - an outrage far worse than the Andrew Gilligan “sexed-up dossier” affair of 2003 - and those responsible are now slinking away almost unpunished.
The dodgy dossier, with its links in a paper chain to an iffy war and the deaths of Dr Kelly and Our Boys in Iraq, is a less great scandal than newspapers sensationalising on a single thread story of a missing child? So says this left-wing, Labour-supporting organ.
The editors and proprietors of the papers responsible for the great balloon of speculative nonsense that was the McCann story had the power to kill off discussion of what went wrong in the press, and they used it. When their balloon burst, they simply began pretending it had never existed.
They moved on to another story. Some papers – the Express being the chief culprit - were simply sued and paid up, or settled out of court. The McCanns won money for their cause, and the story once more featured in the national press.
Not one editor and, so far as I know, not one reporter has lost his or her job or even faced formal reprimand as a result of the McCann coverage.
Daily Express editor Peter Hill has left the Press Complaints Commission. If anyone knows a reporter who got a bollocking do tell us.
Catchcart then plays the most reaching game of Tabloid Bingo we’ve seen for a while:
Our national press is unforgiving when things go wrong, and the problem doesn’t have to be as apocalyptic as the banking crisis.
Credit Crunch and Our Maddie.
Ask Steve McClaren, pilloried so comprehensively for his performance as England manager that he now coaches at a small club in the eastern Netherlands.
In-ger-land and Our Maddie.
Ask Sir Ian Blair, the former Commissioner of the Met, whose scalp was demanded by most of the right-wing press even though crime figures were improving.
Menezes and Our Maddie.
Ask the two BA executives who had to go after the disastrous opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five (Willie Walsh, their boss, survived a clamour of calls for his own resignation).
Big business and Our Maddie.
Ask, indeed, the long line of government ministers from Charles Clarke back to Cecil Parkinson and beyond, who have been ordered out of office by editors and leader writers whose high expectations they failed to satisfy.
Politics and Our Maddie.
If anything like the same standards were applied to the people running national newspapers, at least three or four of them would have been dispatched to their nearest jobcentres months ago for their conduct in the McCann coverage.
What is the job of newspaper editors? To sell newspapers? Does Madeleine McCann sell newspapers? Is it bingo yet?
Very few stories have commanded such intense public interest since the death of Princess Diana.
Bingo!
No explanation has emerged besides the obvious one: that this was all done to sell newspapers.
(We have has one debate, though.)
Now we’re getting somewhere. Do you have to buy newspapers? Do you have to buy newspapers as you would have to go to war, use money or have elected leaders? Cathcart has made his point. He wants answers. He now asks:
Perhaps this judgement is harsh.
Now we’re getting somewhere. (How many words to go. Ed?)… And what of the punishments?
The sums are far below the levels that might alter behaviour in Fleet Street; indeed, editors laugh off such penalties when, as in this case and in the recent Max Mosley sadomasochist sex scandal, they can be set against extra copies sold.
Indeed, the fines are not all that much for national newspapers to stand. So says Cathcart who has just told us:
If it didn’t add sales, then at least it helped a paper compete with other titles doing the same thing.
Did sales go up when Madeleine McCann was on the front page? In his piece on the weakness of newspaper reporting Cathcart does not say…
But, then, Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University.
Madeleine McCann - Still missing
Posted: 24th, October 2008 | In: Madeleine McCann, Media | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Comments
October 24th, 2008 at 8:22 am
First
October 24th, 2008 at 8:26 am
catnapping on GMTV
all the key words
search, taken, predator, gangs
October 24th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Morning Brandon, if you’re still around.
Not one hack thinks that the excessive Maddie Mania (balloons, pray for Maddie etc etc etc…) and the McCanns P.R. campaign (which has yielded nothing but an urban myth about swarthy foreigners dragging upset blonde girls all over Europe and North Africa) is a scandal - but reprinting (under the guise of it being outrageous, disgusting, sickening etc) the crap in the Portuguese tabloids is…?
What hold do Kate and Gerry have over Fleet Street?
(I know Spongebob, I’m talking about the media again! Tsk, and on a media website n’all).
October 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am
How does Cuddle Cat manage to get in all the pictures! He’s so vain!
October 24th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Please look, we can’t be arsed.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Has anyone seen cuddlecat(s) since the Flight into the UK in Sept 2007 ?
October 24th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Karen
You don’t talk about the media much, except to say that this is your area of interest in this case.
And you misunderstand me - I would be interested to hear your views on the media
October 24th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Matt,
On a witness protection program last I heard. Better than a washing machine program!
October 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Spongebob
You’re talking rubbish - I talk about the media all the time. If you could be arsed scrolling through the old threads you’d see that.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:25 am
SteveT
They were busy with the wider agenda…
October 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Karen
I have no need to scroll to read your posts advising us that you are studying the media. And that you are at University. Etc.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Karen, what else is there to say about the media which Anokra hasn’t already stitched up in his piece?
Cathcart’s a clown, almost as bad as Roy Greenslade; neither of them say a word about the ongoing tabloidisation of the broadsheets, neither of them appear to grasp that good reporting requires analytical thought, not sentimentality, neither of them appear to grasp that ratchetting up levels of fear in communities screws them big time, and neither of them appear to grasp that they are feeding a racist ethos which the late and unlamented Haider would have given his eye teeth for.
All in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in almost a hundred years; fertile ground for the rise of Haider clones…
October 24th, 2008 at 11:36 am
chenier
True - it’s a good summing up.
Spongebob is being a cretin though. He’s got it in for me, for some reason.
I’m always talking about the way Urban Myths work and lamenting the crapness of the columnists esp. Alison Pearson.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Karen
I haven’t got it in for you. You threw in the snide comment this morning, presumably as you still seething from our last conversation. I apologise if I upset you, previously and today. Clearly it is not just you who will react when provoked.
Indeed, your life seems to be worthy of interest. You spoke of writing a book - Can I suggest the epistolary style for your first publication?
October 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Karen,
Perhaps Spongebob has a yen for the dreaded AP; implausible, I agree, but not wholly impossible.
But the serious points remain; how can people who hold themselves out to be leaders in the profession continue to deliver drivel no better than the tabloids themselves? Or is it simply that journalism in this country has dumbed down to the point that it’s irretrievable?
Some months back I quoted a piece in the Financial Times by a US journalist on the differences between reporting here and in the US; the danger, as he perceived it, was that though people make fun of the rather stolid stuff in papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, the claim by journalists here that they don’t have to try to get it right because no-one believes journalists is both disingenuous and self-serving.
They can keep on taking the money whilst pretending that they are not really doing any damage…
October 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Journalism is not literature
Today’s newspaper lines tomorrow’s litter tray and parrot cage, and both the cat and the parrot know what to do.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Spongebob
Ok, I am seething. I’ve got a headache cos I’m doing an essay. I’ll cease seething
Did I say I was doing a book? Must have been booze.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Peter,
Or todays newspaper lines tomorrow’s “fund” money.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
(I posted this on the other thread as well).
Chenier
The broadsheets have got worse IMO. I don’t think they have the money for real research and they’re often too close to the subjects they’re writing about - I worked as a P.R. for a theatre company and I was practically negotiating with the hack about what s/he would write - for their benefit and mine.
And a family friend (in politics) said it wasn’t the press that find you out - if you’re in a scandal - it’s your own party wanting you out and offering you up for a monstering.
But maybe it was always like that????
October 24th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Karen wrote:
Chenier
The broadsheets have got worse IMO. I don’t think they have the money for real research and they’re often too close to the subjects they’re writing about - I worked as a P.R. for a theatre company and I was practically negotiating with the hack about what s/he would write - for their benefit and mine.
And a family friend, in politics, said it wasn’t the press that find you out - if you’re in a scandal - it’s your own party wanting you out and offering you up for a monstering.
But maybe it was always like that????
October 24th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Journalism can be dangerous - it has a vested interest in keeping heightened stories going regardless of the social consequences (unless the consequence was a fall in sales).
I’ve been reading a fascinating book about the reporting of child abuse. It seems that we first created the image of beautiful innocent children, then got hysterical about the innocence being violated, then had a counter-hysteria about false accusations and all 3 types of story keep the bandwagon rolling… the author blames the Victorians.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Karen
I don’t think it was always like that; there was certainly a great deal of information known to journalists which didn’t make it into the Press, such as JFK’s abysmal health problems, but the broadsheets here in earlier years did try to report fact.
I agree that they are little, if any, better than the tabloids; it was Andrew Gilligan writing for the Mail stable who did some good muckraking on the pork barrel spending of Ken Livingstone’s cronies rather than a broadsheet reporter.
I know that some journo’s complain that they are too short of money to do decent reporting, but you don’t need money to read, think and write.
The information about the financial markets was out there, for anyone with some expertise and an inclination to investigate; the fact that the vast majority of people had never heard of credit default swaps, for example, wasn’t because its existence was a deep dark secret.
The size of the CDS market, and the players, was not and is not easily accessible information, because nobody knows, but its existence was well known. And yet the media wholly failed to grasp what was going on until AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, collapsed as a result of playing with CDS. And even then it took weeks for many of the broadsheets to try providing an explanation…
That wasn’t because they didn’t have the time, it was because they didn’t have the inclination…
October 24th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Karen
The image of children as unspoilt little angels certainly didn’t exist in this country for many centuries; it is of relatively recent derivation.
Would love to discuss more but have to go and buy food; catch up with you later…
October 24th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Chenier
That’s true - I knew that the banks were in financial trouble because my Mum’s an exec. at a bank that shall remain nameless and she’s been saying that the industry went dodgy in the late 80s & when she started (in the 70s) it was respectable etc… since I was tiny.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
24/10/08
Expresso and Marinho Pinto Published Leonor Cipriano Forged Pictures
Expresso Cover article by Marinho Pinto
Allegedly Faked or Photoshoped Pictures of Leonor Cipriano with (and without) bruises have just emerged in the Media. The Expresso newspaper published an article written by the actual bar of the Lawyers Order using the alleged fake pictures in 2004, one of those pictures is used as evidence against the 5 PJ Inspectors.
The question remains: Why?
http://joana-morais.blogspot.com/
October 24th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Karen Says:
October 24th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
The historical information, surrounding the story of Amelia Dyer, in Victorian
England does not leave the Politicians of those days in a very good light.
Their attitudes regarding unmarried pregnancies and single mother’s and adooption,
in general was quite deplorable, and the various Legislations passed in Parliament to..er..”improve” these moral outrages allowed a child abuser/murderer like Dyer
to prosper greatly.
Baby farming was her modus operandi, and the murdering of many of her
new “charges” took place within hours of her taking them into her “care”.
No one knows for sure how many baby murders she actually committed, but a
recent TV programme about her suggested that it could have been up to 400,
and possibly more during her 30 year murderous practices.
She used to dump the child corpes into the Thames, wrapped in wrapping paper
and with a brick to help the “parcel” sink.
She was not the only person at that time to dispose of the child corpses in such
a fashion, it was a regular feature for child remains to be dredged out of those
waters.
Maybe Margaret T was unaware of the true values of Victorian England, when
she urged us, so avidly, to return to them. If she was, she was rather ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Dyer
October 24th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Brandon - dowie has been sacked.
October 24th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
That’ll please the old man
October 24th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Thanks my little pepsi x
October 24th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Pigeons - Closely related to dinosaurs !