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

SUE CARROLL (Mirror): The McGuckins are “ashamed”.

“What they should not be are convenient scapegoats for the Portuguese police who, a year on, have failed to turn up even a sliver of evidence on the fate of Madeleine McCann”

McCann. McGuckin. It’s Tabloid Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!

DAILY MAIL: “Big Brother? Hardly. The CCTV cameras don’t work - and actually make crime even worse”

Says Ross Clark: “The revelation that only three per cent of London street robberies are solved by CCTV cameras comes as no surprise to me.”

It is a similar story with that other great arm of the surveillance society: the national DNA database. So far, there has been muted public protest at the database, on which there is now the DNA of 4.5 million Britons recorded. But the public’s view of the database is based on the assumption that it is helping to catch criminals. Yesterday, however, the Home Office admitted that for every 800 samples added to the database, it helps solve just one crime.

For example?

In fact, as quickly became obvious with the Madeleine McCann case, in which DNA recovered from the boot of Gerry and Kate McCann’s hired car contributed to the couple being made official suspects in their daughter’s disappearance, the reality is that detectives have to sift through imperfect samples incapable of giving perfect matches.

In the McCann case, the DNA ‘evidence’ suggested Madeleine’s body had been in a car which the McCanns had not hired until three weeks after their daughter had disappeared and it eventually proved to be useless.

GLOBE & MAIL (Canada): “Every parent is haunted by a near-miss story”

Salad Days with Judith Timson and her family:

I went outside and measured “not 50 yards” and figured it was probably to my neighbour’s house at the corner, which, if you left young children alone without a walkie-talkie to hear them, might as well have been halfway across town.

Aaaahhhhh!!!!!!!!! How that, Judith? Can you hear me, now?

Every parent, surely, has a near-miss story, when inattention or a bad decision - often made for selfish reasons - could have led to their child’s death.

One of mine was during the supper hour, when, as the frazzled mother of a one-year-old and a three-year-old, I reasoned that the little one could remain on the third floor with her brother watching television, while I went down, blessedly unhampered, to cook dinner. In an open-concept house, I figured I would hear any trouble.

After a few minutes, I called up to ask my son how his sister was doing, but got no answer. I took the stairs two at a time, my heart rate escalating. I found my son still engrossed in the TV, but his sister had crawled off into a bedroom, where she was sitting upright with the cord from a window blind wrapped tightly around her neck, pulling away from it. “No,” I thought, a one-word instant horror story.

I scooped her up and took her back downstairs to safety. And so there was no news story about a child strangling…

Just a comment piece about a child nearly strangling, sort of. Phew!

Madeleine McCann: Making copy while the sun shines

Posted: 7th, May 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Madeleine McCann, Tabloids. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0