Media Mayhem - MCCANN MEDIA NONSENSE OF THE DAY

By Dominic Herbert
09/08/2009
 
A VICTORIA BECKHAM lookalike named in the Madeleine McCann case was tracked down yesterday and insisted: “I have nothing to do with her disappearance.”
 
Like the e-fit picture released on Thursday by Maddie investigators, Judith Aron does have black spiky hair.
 
But unlike pop star Posh Spice, 35, she is FIFTY-THREE. Miss Aron also insists she has not left her native Australia since 2000. Maddie disappeared from Portugal on May 3, 2007, just days short of her fourth birthday.
 
The dramatic twist in the case came when Nelida Martinez from Sydney recognised the e-fit and went to police with a photo of Miss Aron. It is believed the pic was taken on a flight from Portugal to Spain in 1997.
 
Reporters in Australia got wind of the story and tracked down Miss Aron to Melbourne where, bizarrely, she lives in Madeline Street.
 
Miss Aron, who has a fair-haired daughter around the age Maddie would be now, told an Oz newspaper: “I’m 53 and I certainly don’t look like a Spice Girl. I can honestly say I have no connection to the little girl.

http://madeleinemccann.org/blog/2014/04/20/the-victoria-beckham-lookalike-suspect-3/


The 'Best of' the comments by Peter Rhodes from the Express and Star was whooshed though. As you do.


Best of Peter Rhodes column, 14 August 2009

Best of Peter Rhodes column Express and Star Peter Rhodes 14 August 2009 YOU can tell the silly season has begun – there is a “development” in the Madeleine McCann story. More than two years after the little girl vanished in Portugal, a report emerges of a mysterious woman who, three days after the 2007 abduction, asked a tourist  in Barcelona (700 miles away) : “Are you here to deliver my new daughter?” As you do. The “stunned tourist” kept quiet about this conversation for so long “for personal reasons”.  As you do. It’s just another Maddie fairytale. Take a huge pinch of salt with it. As you do.

The Victoria Beckham look alike was tracked down.   How?

How many Australian women are there with black spikey hair?  Thousands I imagine and this one lady insisted that she had not left Australia since 2000.  So how was she tracked down?

Fifty three years old and being described as a Victoria Beckham look alike.   If I owned a beauty cream company I would snap this woman up like a shot and ask how come no lines and ask if she would  advertise my product.

Silly season indeed.

If this isn't the right thread for this mods please move  How strange that there has been no comment from the McCann camp regarding the disappearance of Maelys De Araujo, the nine year old missing in France since the early hours of last Sunday. Police are considering abduction as a possibility yet the McCanns have not yet jumped in to link themselves to the story as they usually do. The police, in this case, responded in force within an hour yet have thus far been unable to find where she is or if she was taken. This makes the McCanns criticism of the Portuguese police look silly as they have always implied that Madeleine would have been recovered had the police acted sooner and with greater numbers. The French police are considering abduction but have stressed the importance of keeping all other possibilities open. Maybe this accounts for the lack of an article by Tracey about how the McCanns empathize with Maelys' parents etc. etc. Notably the reportage of this child's disappearance does not appear to have attracted the Media blitz that Madeleine's did, neither in France nor internationally. Hopefully this young girl has not met with harm but the passage of time suggests otherwise.

Phoebe wrote:If this isn't the right thread for this mods please move

No, not the right thread but fear not - the weekend is nigh.

By close of business on Sunday 3rd September, if there's not a report of the McCanns offering their support and/or being buoyed up, depending on progress, I'll eat my proverbial hat.

Then you can publish the press report on this thread with impunity .  I'll even reserve a place.

McCann attacks media speculation  [Gerry McCann was speaking at the Edinburgh festival]

25th August 2007

The father of missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann has asked the media to end the constant speculation about his daughter's whereabouts.

He said there had been "huge amounts written with no substance" and that it was not necessary to "bombard people on a daily basis" with Madeleine's image.

Gerry McCann told the BBC the media campaign to find her would be scaled down and take on a "low-key format".

Madeleine, of Rothley, Leicestershire, disappeared in the Algarve on 3 May.

Mr McCann, who is originally from Glasgow, described coverage of the abduction from his family's Algarve apartment as being "10 times greater than we ever possibly imagined".

 Although he acknowledged that he and his wife Kate had initially sought publicity, there was now a "lack of control" in the coverage, he said.

He told the Edinburgh TV festival his family had deliberately "tried to withdraw" from the public spotlight and signalled the coverage of the campaign to find his daughter would be scaled down.

"The compromise has always been do we do something because it will help Madeleine," he said.

"Unfortunately the human interest side of this is enormous now and that's been very difficult."

'Wild speculation'

It was not necessary for the media to "bombard people on a daily basis with Madeleine's image" and the couple did not expect to sustain the same level of coverage throughout their campaign, he said.

Everything the family did was being scrutinised, he added, and this had become "very unpleasant".

Police in Portugal have dismissed press allegations that Mr and Mrs McCann were involved in their daughter's disappearance, saying the couple were not suspects in the case.

 Mr McCann said that although the British media and photographers had been "very respectful and kept their distance" from his family in Portugal, the pressure on journalists to find a story was leading to "absolutely wild speculation" about what had happened.

"Even early on, there was saturation coverage with nothing to report, and there are commercial decisions being made with filling column inches and time on TV," he said.

"Particularly in the last six weeks, other than the recent searches, there has been nothing."

He said it was the responsibility of TV producers and editors to make it clear when reporters were "talking about speculation".

Campaign 'scaled down'

Mr McCann, interviewed by Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, said he first realised the scale of media interest when he and his wife returned from the police station soon after Madeleine's disappearance to find "about 150" journalists outside their apartment.

However, he said in order to fill a "void" in details from the police investigation, he and his wife had conducted a series of interviews to raise awareness of Madeleine's disappearance.
 But Mr McCann said he now wanted the story to be "reported responsibly and only newsworthy material" used.

"Staying in Portugal may be counter-productive because of the attention on Kate and I, and that generates pressure on people to write things," he said.

 He added that he had now started thinking about returning to the UK and his job as a consultant cardiologist in Leicester.

"I've spent such a long time training and I have got a lot of sub-specialist expertise, and there aren't a lot of people who have that.

"The difficulty we have is leaving Portugal as a family of four, when we arrived as a family of five."

Madeleine disappeared from her family's apartment room in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz while her parents were eating with friends at a nearby restaurant.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6963499.stm

Reporter's log: Edinburgh TV Festival


The 32nd Edinburgh International TV Festival brought together almost 2,000 executives, celebrities and pundits to discuss the state of the television industry, and to look ahead to new shows and innovations.

The BBC News website's Kevin Young attended the event, writing about the main talking points from the executives and stars.

[snipped]

SATURDAY, 25 AUGUST: 0830 BST

So it's day two of the festival, and one of the most high-profile sessions of the weekend is being held this morning.

Newsnight's Kirsty Wark is interviewing Gerry McCann about the relationship he and his family have had with the media since the disappearance of his daughter Madeleine in Portugal in May.

Then it's time for the controller of BBC One, Peter Fincham, to be grilled by Panorama and BBC Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine.

Normally this would be a fairly straightforward discussion of programmes and prospects - but Fincham is the man who stood before journalists at a press launch and said the trailer for a new documentary showed the Queen walking out of a photo shoot "in a huff".

Of course, this turned out to be anything but fact, and the controller found himself appearing on his own channel to apologise.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6961958.stm

What was Gerry McCann doing there?

Hi Verdi,also appearing the same day as our Gerry,Kirsty interview,but later on in the day,another well known reptile(Cigar smoker)was in the same vicinity on the same day.  Wonder who was fixing things for people,eh BBC,Fake news,hope these fellow"Brothers" had never met up at this event?

I'm Sorry Madeleine


She says they felt so safe at the "family-friendly" resort they didn't think twice about leaving Madeleine and the twins - and she reveals how they'd left them alone every evening as they ate dinner in the week until Madeleine was taken on a Thursday night.

 But she admits it was a decision that torments her with every waking moment. "We've doubted what we did," Kate says. "It's hard to answer the question, 'Were we wrong to leave them?' If I'd had to think for one second, 'Should we have dinner and leave them?' I wouldn't have done it.

 "It didn't happen like that. I didn't have to think for a second, that's how safe I felt. It's not like we went down town or anything. That night runs over and over in my mind and I'm sure people will learn from our mistake, if you want to call it that. I love her and I'm a totally responsible parent and that's the only thing that keeps me going."

Sunday Mirror - 5th August 2007





"It felt so safe...."  -  Kate McCann [circa. 2007]

Verdi wrote:I'm Sorry Madeleine


She says they felt so safe at the "family-friendly" resort they didn't think twice about leaving Madeleine and the twins - and she reveals how they'd left them alone every evening as they ate dinner in the week until Madeleine was taken on a Thursday night.

 But she admits it was a decision that torments her with every waking moment. "We've doubted what we did," Kate says. "It's hard to answer the question, 'Were we wrong to leave them?' If I'd had to think for one second, 'Should we have dinner and leave them?' I wouldn't have done it.

 "It didn't happen like that. I didn't have to think for a second, that's how safe I felt. It's not like we went down town or anything. That night runs over and over in my mind and I'm sure people will learn from our mistake, if you want to call it that. I love her and I'm a totally responsible parent and that's the only thing that keeps me going."

Sunday Mirror - 5th August 2007





"It felt so safe...."  -  Kate McCann [circa. 2007]

Hi Verdi,perhaps Kate was right all along of how safe it was in and around apartment 5a Ocean Club Apartments.  

As there has only been One child reported to have disappeared from this Holiday apartment Block, Madeleine McCann since 3 May 2007 to my knowledge,of course I stand to be corrected if wrong,so it was a safe place,not full of the Paedophile burglars DCI Andy Redwood had in his reports to the Media,via Crime Watch October 2013?

It is time for the UK Government to either wash it's very dirty smudged finger prints of an a association to a "Cover Up" or a Unique Hoax has been promoted as a prolonged arrangement to help to keep the Madeleine McCann case disappearance as an unfortunate incident involving MI5 and numerous Police Forces,who cannot account for the child's disappearance,thesis,"What Is Likely To Have Happened"? 
Operation Grange,put back onto the"Top Shelf"eh Big Jim,everyone Not accounted for?

willowthewisp wrote:Hi Verdi,perhaps Kate was right all along of how safe it was in and around apartment 5a Ocean Club Apartments.  

As there has only been One child reported to have disappeared from this Holiday apartment Block, Madeleine McCann

  Well spotted!

Madeleine: Is Robert Murat a suspect or a scapegoat?
by DAVID JONES
Last updated at 11:06 02 June 2007

In the eyes of many, Robert Murat has already been tried and found guilty of abducting Madeleine. But David Jones has had the first full interview with him - and comes to a very unsettling conclusion.


Last Wednesday, while Gerry and Kate McCann were in Rome imploring the Pope to pray for the safe return of their four-year-old daughter, Madeleine, I spent a disquieting afternoon on the Algarve, drinking coffee with Robert Murat.

Depending on your point of view (and in a tragedy whose every grim twist is played out in the public gaze, everyone has an opinion), Murat is either the most vile creature on earth or the most unjustly vilified.

Eighteen days ago, this enigmatic, Portuguese-raised Englishman was arrested on suspicion of abducting Madeleine from a holiday apartment just 120 yards from the villa he shares with his widowed mother, Jenny.


Murat was released without charge after 19 hours of questioning. Yet today - a month after Madeleine's hauntingly pretty face first became etched in our collective nightmares - he remains the only formally identified police suspect.
Ordinarily, of course, an accused man retains his innocence until proven guilty. But this is no ordinary case. The McCanns' increasingly desperate publicity campaign (yesterday they were in Madrid) has made it the most high-profile child abduction in history.

So, inevitably, every aspect of Robert Murat's life is being subjected to microscopic scrutiny. And in the absence of confirmed facts, wild rumours are circulating about his life and background.

If we believe some of what has been written about him, Murat is a pervert who fits the profile of a child abductor all too well. He may be the father of a four-year-old girl, but, according to unnamed sources, he is a social misfit who visits paedophile websites.

It has also been suggested that he coldly volunteered to assist in the hunt for Madeleine to glean inside information, and remain one step ahead of the police investigation, just as Ian Huntley did after the Soham murders
.
Weighed with various accrued morsels of suspicion against him - an unexplained 11.40pm phone call on the night of the abduction; a car hired hastily two days later - some close observers have concluded that Murat is, indeed, the monster who took Madeleine, and that it is only a matter of time before he is formally charged with her abduction.

Over the forthcoming days, they may yet be proved right, though given the performance of the Portuguese police, this seems unlikely. For the story Murat had to tell me raises profound and disturbing questions about the nature of the Madeleine investigation.
"They held me for all that time, but they didn't even take a DNA sample from me," he told me, incredulously. "Can you believe that? I would happily have provided a swab."

Assuming Murat is telling the truth, this is a jaw- dropping omission, and throws the entire forensic operation into question.
Privately, it will doubtless appall the McCanns. However, a source close to the couple assures me they do not believe Murat took their daughter, regarding him as a "sad loner" whose involvement has distracted attention which could have been usefully deployed elsewhere.

At the risk of being proved foolish, having spent 90 minutes with Murat - who chatted to me in the bar of his cousin's guesthouse near Praia da Luz - I believe the McCanns' instincts are probably right. Either that, or Murat is a consummate actor.

Summer ended long ago for the McCanns

By Jan Moir
12:01AM BST 12 Sep 2007
Comment

It has been a long, hot summer in Praia da Luz. Since early May the sun has shone almost without pause, dominating the cloudless sky which provided a mocking, azure frame for thousands of television news reports. Following the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the international focus on this otherwise ordinary seaside resort has been merciless. The whitewashed holiday apartments, brilliant as wedding cakes, now seem as familiar as the buildings in our own neighbourhoods. We can pinpoint the tapas bar with satellite precision. X marks the spot where the mysterious man with the blanket was last seen.

There goes the abracadabra puff of crimson fingerprint powder, which never did produce a genie, or a tangible lead. Not yet anyway, although that is hardly likely to stop the mass speculation from continuing.

In a hideous game of real-life Cluedo, a nation of armchair sleuths appear to have set themselves to solving the mystery of what really happened to Madeleine McCann on the terrible night of May 3, and some of them are doing it with rather more relish than is strictly comfortable. Did the colonel do it with the rope in the bedroom? Was it the stranger with the dagger in the hall? Have the police checked who else rented the hire car, and why there are gaps in the missing time line?

When it comes to the McCanns, we are all Crackers now; part-time criminal psychologists scanning faces for the tiniest sign of emotional fissure and searching for motive amidst this rubble of an investigation. Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine. Like an invocation or eternally mumbled chant, sometimes it is all you can hear on the wind. And while the Maddy cult is not a healthy obsession, its emergence can hardly be surprising.

The McCanns' decision to launch a high-profile campaign to find their daughter has brought out the best and the worst in British people; their good heart and best wishes, their financial donations and their hopes for a happy outcome jostle uncomfortably with a waggle-eyed, soap-opera prurience and an odd, steaming hatred from those who have convinced themselves that the parents are to blame. They are entitled to their views, but what happened to innocent until proved guilty?

As hate mail begins to seep under the McCanns' doormat, the least we can do for them in their anguish is to give them the civilised benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, Gerry McCann's pleas for privacy jar with the cultists, and why not? Public awareness and curiosity are not taps that can be turned off once the roots of a cause have been watered. The McCanns invited the people into their lives for good reason, but seem not to have grasped the essential truth that while the drama roars on, the interest they stoked in their plight will continue. Yes, it is tough, but they will have to put up with it, just as those who donated to the fund to find Madeleine must put up with their cash possibly ending up in the pockets of lawyers protecting Mr and Mrs McCann instead.

Meanwhile, the season draws to a close in Praia da Luz and the beaches are starting to empty. The McCanns used to walk here, their progress along the sand applauded by locals and tourists alike. Applause? For what? Stoicism and endurance, perhaps, their thin-lipped fortitude in this strange and bleak aftermath of a childhood interrupted. Those fruitless, hopeless photocalls of early summer seem like an innocent eternity ago, before the McCann tans deepened and attitudes towards them hardened.

The fact that neither of them ever broke down in front of the cameras seemed to count against them, as if it were somehow possible that anyone holds the copyright on how to behave correctly in times of grief and stress. The tightly wound McCanns are not sobbers or coffin kissers and they do not play to the gallery in a crowd-pleasing way. Yet who would have thought that summer would come to this bad end, with a torrent of whispered abuse and innuendo? Crowds outside a police station hissed at Kate McCann when she arrived to answer police questions, messages of hate have been posted on the website that Gerry McCann launched to help find his daughter.

Hounded out of Portugal on a wave of slurs and rumour, these broken people have returned home to the agony of a silent and empty child's bedroom and to the morbid fascination of a nation that, they will be horrified to learn, has no intention of losing interest in their case. How much more can they, or we, take? Something ugly is in the air, something that brings to mind the creaking tumbril of the condemned and the relish of the knitters by the guillotine. Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine. God knows where it is all going to end.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3642626/Summer-ended-long-ago-for-the-McCanns.html

Kate McCann: why didn’t they believe her?

The disappearance of her daughter drove the doctor and mother-of-three to the brink of suicide, she says. Cassandra Jardine reports

9th May 2011



So far there has been only one public recantation. A tabloid journalist wrote yesterday that he “rues the day” he rubbished the McCanns’ version of the disappearance of their daughter, Madeleine, four years ago. Many others might follow suit having read Kate McCann’s account of events, which will be published this Thursday, to mark Madeleine’s eighth birthday.

From advance extracts of her book, Madeleine, she emerges not as the hatchet-faced blonde who generated so many vicious blogs, comments and column-inches, but as an ordinary woman who reacted to catastrophe by appearing tight-lipped and dry-eyed. That didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling everything any woman would feel after she checked the holiday apartment in Praia de Luz, in Portugal, at 10pm on Friday, May 3, 2007. In her children’s room, she found the two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie, sleeping soundly but in three year-old Madeleine’s bed, only Cuddle Cat was to be found. Seeing the patio windows open, a succession of emotions raced through her brain: “Nausea, terror, disbelief, fear. Icy fear. Dear God, no! Please, no!”
In the days, weeks and years that followed, she tells us that she was prey to such despair that, at times, she contemplated suicide by swimming out to sea. Oblivion would have been preferable to imagining what a paedophile might be doing to her daughter, the guilt that tormented her and those terrible mornings when, having dreamt of being reunited with Madeleine, she awoke to harsh reality.

Many of us would prefer not to revisit this painful story again, especially since there is no resolution to one of the great mysteries of our time. Four years ago, we gorged on every detail of the Tapas Seven, the man seen carrying a child in a blanket, and the DNA testing of the car that the McCanns hired for their Algarve holiday. It was a latter-day Grimms’ fairy story, one that stirred up every parent’s fears because we have all taken tiny risks, whether it be leaving children in the car while dashing to the cashpoint or nipping to the loo when they are playing in water.

Accidents are always foreseeable, but only with hindsight, and most don’t happen. As I wrote then, having visited the crime scene in Praia de Luz, I too would have left my children asleep in the McCanns’ apartment, which was visible (though not entirely) from the resort restaurant. I might not even have checked them as often as the diligent tapas diners, who returned to the rooms every 15 minutes.

Others disagreed vociferously. Men and women have accused Kate, a part-time GP, of being a bad mother and worse, while Gerry, her cardiologist husband, has had a relatively easy ride. Her critics may chiefly wish to reassure themselves that such bad luck could never befall them, but their venom suggests a lingering prejudice against working mothers, especially those who dress neatly, express themselves crisply, go to church and jog in order to keep up some semblance of normality amid emotional chaos.

Had Kate not been pretty, middle-class and educated, she might have received more sympathy – like, say, Karen Matthews, mother of Shannon, who wept fetchingly for the cameras the following year, although her daughter had not in fact been abducted, only hidden for mercenary reasons. Loaded magazine was one of her few supporters when, crassly, it put the bereft mother on a most-fanciable list. That angel face encouraged the fanciful to think that she must be a devil in disguise, guilty if not of murder then of negligence, just like Lindy Chamberlain, whose child disappeared in the Australian outback 27 years previously. Chamberlain served four years in prison before the child’s clothes were found in a dingo’s lair.

Kate was made an arguida – chief suspect – by the Portuguese police, who could not amass enough evidence for a charge. But her book doesn’t have the plaintive tone of a woman seeking to exonerate herself. She chose to write, it seems, not so much to silence those who still call her a wicked woman, but to raise money for the campaign to find Madeleine. With no police force actively pursuing the case, the McCanns want to continue to employ private investigators.

The book should add considerably to the £130,000 left in the kitty. Despite the fine-tooth comb applied to the evidence four years ago by the press, if not the police, fascinating new details emerge from her account. One that made me shudder was that the nine adults in the McCanns’ party block-booked the restaurant near their apartments because it was so close to their sleeping children. Very sensible. But anyone looking for an unattended child could have known this, because a thoughtless member of staff wrote down both the booking, and the reason for it, on a desk at the pool reception, where it could have been easily observed by a paedophile on the lookout for unattended children.

“Who’s thinking about child abductions in a sleepy, out-of-town tourist resort?” asked Gerry McCann, expressing the common view among parents that places stuffed full of other parents with small children are supremely secure. Chillingly, the McCanns learnt after the abduction that not only are such resorts an obvious target for paedophiles, but also that parents should have been warned to be vigilant. In 2008, when the Portuguese police officially stopped pursuing the case, their files revealed that in the three years preceding Madeleine’s disappearance, three intruders had been disturbed in children’s bedrooms within an hour’s drive of Praia de Luz and five children had been abused in their beds while on holiday in the Algarve. Evidence had not been collected, let alone collated or publicised.

Among the known paedophiles who could have been in the area are a British couple, Charles O’Neill, 48, and William Lauchlan, 34, both of whom are now in prison for murder in Britain. In May 2007, they were living in Spain, and possibly Portugal, on false passports. The previous year, they were posing as cleaners in a holiday villa complex in Gran Canaria when a child, Yeremi Vargas, went missing. Another possible suspect is Martin Ney, 40, who last month was arrested for the murder of Dennis Klein, a nine-year-old who vanished on a school trip in Germany in 2001. Ney resembles the photofit of the man seen carrying a child by one of the Tapas Seven, shortly before Madeleine’s bed was found empty.

One day, perhaps, the McCanns will have their answer. They are determined not to give up. Carrying on the fight may be a key reason why they have remained together when differing approaches to shock and grief often drive a wedge between parents. James Bulger’s parents parted soon after he was murdered by children in 1993. So too did those of Sarah Payne, who was abducted by Roy Whiting in Sussex in 2000. Kate is not the first woman to have found her husband’s preference for working all hours to shut out the pain “almost offensive”.

The McCanns have two other children, who have been both a solace and a binding influence. But the thought that saved them from despair was that if Madeleine were found, she would wish to come back to a happy home, not one fractured by grief. It is possible that, like Jaycee Dugard or Natascha Kampusch, the girl in the red dress with the unusual eye will one day reappear.
If so, she will find that her mother and father have behaved in a dignified manner – which is more than can be said of some of their critics.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/8503610/Kate-McCann-why-didnt-they-believe-her.html

It's always struck me as strange that Operation Grange was launched at exactly the same time as Kate McCann's autobiography 'madeleine'  -  May 2011 !!!  Too strange for mere coincidence.

Verdi wrote:

	Original Source: TIMES: SUNDAY 10 AUGUST 2008
	August 10, 2008 Steven Swinford

Evidence from files on the Madeleine McCann investigation show how badly her parents were treated by Portuguese police

Kate McCann holding Madeleine's cuddly toy Steven Swinford. Additional reporting: Rita Jordao

In recent months Kate and Gerry McCann have been trying to regain some normality in their lives after their daughter Madeleine disappeared in May last year. Gerry has returned to work as a hospital consultant, Kate is busy with Sean and Amelie, their three-year-old twins.

Then last week the Portuguese police, the Policia Judiciaria, released their dossier on the case - and its contents stunned the family all over again.

Despite being prepared for the worst, the couple were shocked by the dossier's evidence of incompetence, missed opportunities - and of the determination of the Portuguese police to implicate the McCann's in their daughter's disappearance.

They learnt that two e-fits of suspects were never released; that a series of reported sightings of Madeleine were kept secret from them; and that Scotland Yard intelligence suggested Madeleine had been snatched by an international paedophile ring.
The McCann's also discovered how the police had misconstrued and overplayed evidence against them; attempted to bug their rented home and car; and asked the Home Office to hand over details of the couple's credit card bills.

 

In a document translated by the Sunday Times yesterday, Tavares Almeida, a chief inspector with the Portuguese police, accused the McCann's and the friends on holiday with them of 'lying'. In a memo dated September 10, Almeida noted: 'The statements from the whole group result in a total lack of coherence, from which we easily conclude that they're all lying.'

 

Also in the file was a letter Kate had written to Paolo Rebelo, the head of the investigation, begging to be kept informed of developments. 'I am appealing to you as a fellow human being to work with us (if possible to include us) and to remember that we are Madeleine's parents . . . lack of communication is torture,' she wrote.

She appears to have received no reply. Once again the file rams home how coldly the Portuguese had treated the family.

Yesterday a friend of the McCann's said: 'There is a sense of anger, frustration and great sadness. They've waited for this [evidence of sightings] for a long time. It's work they could have started 15 months ago. But this is the time for them to keep focus and consider everything carefully before deciding what course of action to take. Then they will have their day, they will make their views clear.'

 

The couple's priority remains finding Madeleine, but they are angry and hurt by what the files reveal. They are now considering suing the Portuguese police.

Rogerio Alves, the couple's Portuguese lawyer, has been briefed to examine the files for evidence of incompetence, negligence and malicious intent and then to prepare to lay charges. 'I believe he can recommend charges or action be taken against the police as a whole as well as individual officers if it's felt necessary,' said a friend of the family.

Why did the Policia Judiciaria get it so wrong' Why were they obsessed with proving the McCann's  guilt' From the beginning the dossier reveals how incompetence blighted the investigation. Carlos Pinto de Abreu, one of the McCann lawyers examining the police files, said: 'The early stages of the investigation, led by detectives in Portimao, really were very poor.'

 

When those detectives arrived at 3.30pm on May 4, more than 17 hours after Madeleine's disappearance, they discovered that dozens of local police, friends and family had traipsed through the room, heavily contaminating the scene.

One report in the voluminous files released last week records: 'A number of people had touched the window and entered Madeleine's and the twins' room prior to the arrival of the GNR [local] police . . .' There was a 'lack of preservation of the crime scene'.

 

The case file also reveals how four other families were allowed to stay in the holiday apartment from which Madeleine disappeared before further detailed forensic searches took place.

 

From the start the McCanns were keenly aware how publicising information about their daughter could help the investigation. So they have been dismayed to discover that the Portuguese police had detailed e-fits of potential suspects - but refused to make them public.

 

The case files reveal that the police had two near-identical PhotoFits of a man who was seen acting suspiciously near the McCann's apartment before Madeleine's disappearance. Yet the only image of a suspect circulated publicly was a vague drawing with no facial details. It was ridiculed as an 'egg with hair'.

 

Among the witness reports in the dossier are also three sightings of a girl matching Madeleine's description in Belgium and one in Holland. The McCanns were never told about them. A further potential link with Belgium came in April when the Portuguese police were passed intelligence from Scotland Yard suggesting that Madeleine had been abducted by a Belgian paedophile ring.

 

John Shord, from the Metropolitan police clubs and vice intelligence unit, wrote: 'Intelligence suggests that a paedophile ring in Belgium made an order for a young girl three days before Madeleine McCann was taken. Somebody connected to this group saw Maddie, took a photograph of her and sent it to Belgium. The purchaser agreed that the girl was suitable and Maddie was taken.'

 

Last week British police were playing down the strength of that report. But the McCann's view is that if they had been kept informed, they and their private investigators could have helped.

 

The Portuguese, however, had other ideas. What the case files make clear is just how suspicious the Policia Judiciaria became that the McCann's were responsible for Madeleine's disappearance - and yet how weak the evidence for it was.

 

The pivotal shift in the investigation came at the end of July, after the Portuguese police called in British experts to help review the case. The experts suggested using specialist British sniffer dogs capable of detecting the scent of dead bodies.

According to the case files, the dogs detected scent at five locations in the McCann's' apartment, including by the door of the back bedroom, behind the sofa in the living room, on the veranda outside the parents' bedroom and in the garden under the veranda. The dogs later 'marked' the boot of the McCann's car.

 

The case file contains documents showing that Mark Harrison, the British search expert, and Martin Grimes, the dog-handler, warned that the results should be treated with caution. They insisted that 'corroborating evidence' was needed and that no 'intelligence reliability could be placed on the results'.

 

The Portuguese police, however, treated it very differently. On August 1, the day after the searches, Inspector Joao Carlos, one of the senior investigators, wrote to his superiors stating: 'One must suppose that the child Madeleine McCann could have died inside the apartment.'

 

On the same day Carlos applied for court orders to plant two bugs in the McCann's rented apartment and one in their holiday home. The requests were rejected, but by this stage the police's intentions were clear. The McCann's noticed a distinct coldness in the police response to them, which culminated in them being made suspects just over a month later.

 

The Portuguese police's approach was also clear in their treatment of forensic evidence. On September 3, John Lowe, a scientist from the Birmingham-based Forensic Science Service, informed detectives that a sample taken from the McCann's' Renault Scenic hire car had 15 out of 19 of Madeleine's DNA components.

However, he also urged caution, warning that the result was 'too complex for meaningful interpretation or inclusion'. That qualification was ignored. The case files show that days later the Portuguese police attempted to extract a confession from Gerry by insisting Madeleine's DNA had been found in the boot of the car.

 

One chief inspector of the Portuguese police recorded how he found Gerry 'cold', attributing it to his work as a doctor. He noted: 'During many moments of his professional career he had to make decisions in a fraction of a second, which gives him a coldness.' Yesterday a friend of the McCann's said: 'The whole attitude throughout was one of 'we think they're involved, there are some vague indications, let's throw caution to the wind and see if we can get a conviction'.' For the McCann's, being cut off from the details of the police investigation has been even worse than being made suspects (they have now been exonerated). After Kate's letter in December, the family's lawyers made two further requests for information. Both were refused.

 

Disappointed but undeterred, the McCann's remain steadfast in their belief that Madeleine will be found. Two months ago the couple decided to relegate the role of M3, the gaffe-prone team of Spanish private investigators whose director boasted last year that Madeleine would be 'home by Christmas'. They are now paying an international team of private investigators '166,000 a month (partly funded from a libel settlement with a newspaper) to follow fresh leads. The release of the case files has demonstrated just how much they have to do. 'They're starting from scratch,' said the friend. 'They have to rebuild the entire police investigation.'

They hope that, better late than never, the information from police files will reinvigorate the search for their daughter. On Monday a girl resembling Madeleine was sighted at a bank in Brussels: a security guard became suspicious after spotting a woman of north African appearance struggling to speak French with a blue-eyed, blonde girl. Detectives are also investigating other leads in Belgium.

Yesterday Clarence Mitchell, the McCann's' spokesman, said: 'The documents are a field of potential leads and any one of them could unlock the case. They will never give up the search for Madeleine.'

 

International reach of paedophile rings

Are paedophile gangs at work, especially in Belgium' The existence of paedophile rings in Europe is well documented, writes Nicola Smith.

Last year the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) brought down a ring of 700, run by a Briton, which disseminated images of horrific child abuse. Many paedophile rings stretch across borders, partly through easy internet communication. Belgian police, however, deny that such gangs operate in their country.

For a nation of just 10m, Belgium has been rocked by shocking paedophile scandals. In the 1990s the notorious Marc Dutroux kidnapped and sexually abused six young girls, killing two of them. Dutroux told a Flemish television station: 'A network with all kinds of criminal activities really does exist. But the authorities don't want to look into it.'

Are there any links with Portugal, where Madeleine McCann disappeared' In 2002 Portugal was shaken by allegations of a paedophile ring targeting a state orphanage. Press reports at the time referred to Dutch and Belgian paedophile gangs operating on Portuguese soil. Belgium is well known as a transit point for people trafficking and Belgian nationals have been caught up recently in police stings on international child abuse gangs.

Late last year police in 28 countries busted a global paedophile ring. The operation began when Australian police intercepted a video of two young girls being abused by a Belgian man.

Is there any evidence of children being snatched to order' Child crime experts say the kidnapping of specific children to order is extremely rare. 'In general, paedophiles ask for a particular type of abuse rather than a particular child,' said CEOP. 'The majority of sexual abuse occurs in the home or by people the child knows.'

The Belgian police said: 'We have never had a paedophile network like that to our knowledge, and we have not come across any cases of children being ordered by paedophiles.'

[Acknowledgement Pamalam]

Hi Verdi,So Marc Dutroux, never existed then according to this article, Belgian Paedophile network that must have been a figment of everyone's imagination,the mysterious deaths of people closely associated to,Marc Dutroux and his Trail that the European Court tried to suppress to be held behind closed doors,with endless links to various Continents throughout Europe,Germany, Serbia,Balkan's,Netherland's?
As you can see from some of your articles,the Metropolitan Police Service(John Shord)there is a link to a Paedophile Gang?
To the Official report from Metropolitan Police service/Interpol 2007-2008,that there was No evidence of a "Paedophile Gang"to have been involved with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann?

People keep stating there is/are no elements of "Paedophilia"connected to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann,but quite how you can determine such claims,seems to be ambiguous,especially when CEOP's boss,Jim Gamble has such close affinity to a former named Arquido,along with the 90%claim that RM was there chief suspect in that case,then when you add in his review for Scotland Yard in 2010 before he resigned from his role at CEOP, Home secretary,Theresa May?  The prosecutions involved in Operation Ore,leading to Suicides of innocent Men,that were not guilty, guilt by association was it eh big Jim Gamble!?

willowthewisp wrote:People keep stating there is/are no elements of "Paedophilia"connected to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann,but quite how you can determine such claims,seems to be ambiguous,especially when CEOP's boss,Jim Gamble has such close affinity to a former named Arquido,along with the 90%claim that RM was there chief suspect in that case,then when you add in his review for Scotland Yard in 2010 before he resigned from his role at CEOP, Home secretary,Theresa May? 

Quite so willowthewisp and I'd happily take the discussion further on the following thread but I ask members to please keep comments libel free ..

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t1915-references-to-paedophilia-in-relation-to-the-disappearance-of-madeleine-mccann?highlight=paedophilia

If you wouldn't mind shifting yer bum over.

Terence Blacker: Depressing clichés sadly perpetuated


Monday 3rd May 2010



Whenever a successful woman experiences some kind of career freak-out, the great Having It All debate is re-ignited. Sometimes it is a politician who decides to spend more time with her family who sets the whole thing rolling, sometimes a TV presenter who goes into emotional meltdown.

On this occasion, the respected Daily Mail columnist Allison Pearson has confessed that over the past 18 months she has been waking at 4am with sad, self-destructive thoughts. "Sometimes I think it would be easier not to be," she has told her therapist and her readers. "Not to be dead. I have two children, I can't leave them. But just to stop, you know. To not exist for a while."
So she would be stopping her Daily Mail column. Fortunately – although this fact was strangely not mentioned in the article – she has been recruited by a rival newspaper as a columnist and feature writer.

In the meantime, as is traditional in Having It All stories, the personal is made general. Pearson believes she is not alone. She had been "enrolled in the growing army of depressed middle-aged women. Let's call us The Blues Sisters. Unofficial logo: Edvard Munch's The Scream." The assumption here, so widespread that it has become a widely-accepted mental cliché, is that there is something uniquely troubled and tragic about working women with families.

By a stroke of unlucky timing, those with real knowledge of stress-related mental health problems have recently suggested that this view is, to put it politely, flawed. In spite of the statistics, "in reality men are just as likely to experience depression, but are far less likely to seek help, be diagnosed and seek treatment," according to Paul Farmer, the chief executive of the mental health charity Mind.

Social pressure on men to show strength at all times is one factor. When they do, the diagnostic criteria used to assess levels of depression are geared towards women. Three-quarters of all suicides are male. The figures, in other words, are allowing a myth of female vulnerability to pass itself off as fact. The view from Mind has been independently supported by the Men's Health Forum and by a spokesman for the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Depression is a devastatingly grim experience, and anyone who suffers from it deserves the greatest sympathy and help. It is not, though, something from which the Blues Sisters suffer in particular. Men simply talk – and write – about it rather less.

Can the McCanns be thinking straight?


Three years have passed since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and her parents are determined that the search for her should not slip out of the world's headlines. To keep the story alive, they have just released a moody video, complete with a musical soundtrack, which includes a photograph of the three-year-old wearing make-up and gazing into the camera. It is that image which, predictably, has featured in the media,

It seems a bizarre and unsettling development. Clearly, Kate and Gerry McCann have been living through a nightmare of unimaginable horror and perhaps, even after three years, they are not thinking straight. If so, someone should surely have pointed out to them that, in a case over which paedophilia casts an obvious shadow, it looks downright weird when a photograph which has the effect of sexualising the missing child becomes part of the campaign to find her.

Obviously, the make-up game and the photograph were innocent at the time but, when the private picture is released into the public domain in these circumstances, something altogether nastier kicks in.

What was the point of this exercise, apart from getting more news coverage? At a time when there is justified concern over Primark selling Little Miss Naughty padded bras for eight-year-olds and allegations that Playboy brands are being aimed at the primary school market, the circulation of this can only feed prurience of the very worst kind.

Maybe it was a misjudgement, but it confirms a niggling sense that the McCanns' publicity–at-all-costs campaign has seriously lost its way.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-depressing-clich-s-sadly-perpetuated-1961380.html

Master of media circus for Madeleine McCann

Clarence Mitchell is not backward about coming forward for Gerry and Kate McCann.

7:22PM BST 24 Apr 2008

The first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann will be marked next week with a two-hour television documentary which is the highlight of a carefully stage-managed publicity offensive.

The fly-on-the wall documentary on ITV1 of Gerry and Kate McCann has been organised by Clarence Mitchell, their official spokesman. The Portuguese press first referred to him as the "man in the shadows" when he took the job full-time in Praia da Luz in September.

The newspapers were reporting the (as usual) private views of the Portuguese police that Mitchell, 47, had been sent in by Gordon Brown, no less – when he was Chancellor – to spy on the investigation, which had been portrayed in Britain as amateur and cack-handed.

But the Portuguese media were wrong on both counts. Mitchell would have had at best only a nodding acquaintance with junior ministers, let alone Mr Brown. As director of media monitoring at the Central Office of Information, he was a back room boy but has never been in the shadows of the police operation.

The former BBC television reporter has loved being centre stage before the cameras in an investigation that has transfixed the world's media. "He is on the TV much more than he ever was when he worked for the BBC," said one former colleague.

So much so that photographers regularly have to shout at Mitchell to get out of the way when they are taking pictures of the McCanns. He remains at his fixed point by their shoulder even during photo-shoots, bucking the trend of media minders who avoid being photographed at all costs.

Mitchell has become such a familiar figure in his open-necked pink shirts that he is recognised in the street and is stopped so often on the forecourts of petrol stations that he now jokes it is because he has forgotten to pay his bill.

After almost 30 years as a journalist, he knows what makes a story and has been extraordinarily successful in maintaining a strong interest in Madeleine.

When interest has faltered he has invariably constructed a story or recruited a big name – even the American First Lady, Laura Bush, is on-side – to a campaign driven by parents who accepted early on that the media was a necessary partner.

Nevertheless, the documentary next Wednesday has provoked controversy because ITV1 has scheduled it against the BBC's The Apprentice as part of its ratings war.

The move has led to the accusation that Mitchell has allowed the parents to be exploited by a commercial broadcaster. The fact that Mentorn, the production company making the programme, has given £10,000 to the Find Madeleine fund has not diminished the fuss: the money will be more than recouped from syndication.

ITV1, with the help of Mitchell, has kept other media organisations from the McCanns during the five weeks of the access deal with Mentorn. The company has secured unseen footage of Mrs McCann, 40, her husband, 39, and their three-year-old twins behind the door of their home in Rothley, Leics.

It includes Mrs McCann breaking down in tears as she recalls the night Madeleine went missing. But Mitchell will be undeterred by the barbs, believing the two-hour documentary the best way to ensure that the search for Madeleine goes global again. This is what he is paid to do.

He always wanted to be a journalist and after O-levels at Friern Barnet School, Finchley, where he was head boy, he joined the Barnet & Potters Bar Times and then a BBC training scheme.

In a varied career he covered the Soham murders and, for two years from 2003, the Iraq war.

He was also on the royal beat when he was known – not very imaginatively – as "Clarence House". But it was as a presenter on various BBC news programmes that he hoped to make his career after years on the road. His spell doing hourly bulletins on News 24 is best remembered for him sleeping through a 3am slot, which had to be filled by a somewhat dishevelled producer. He became close to the McCanns after being sent twice by the Foreign Office to look after them when there were 40 camera crews outside their Portuguese apartment.

As a father of three children, aged two to 11, he has gone through the same agonies as many other parents who feared it could have happened to them. His £70,000 salary, equivalent to what he earned in the Civil Service, is being paid by the double-glazing magnate Brian Kennedy, who has bankrolled much of the McCann campaign.

Surrendering his Civil Service pension will be compensated by the future benefits of his role in helping to make Madeleine's the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history. Offers are coming in for book, broadcast, and lecture circuit opportunities when he returns to "ordinary life" – and even Mohamed Fayed is rumoured to be interested in hiring him.

Mitchell divides his time between his home in Bath, London, and Rothley and speaks to the McCanns every day. They are grateful to him for raising the profile of the search across Europe and North Africa, through visits to Morocco, Italy, Spain and Germany. But the revelation that they were flying in a private jet was a bear trap that Mitchell should have spotted, and the couple flew home from a trip to Portugal on easyJet.

Mitchell was, as usual, only a few feet away from the couple when they met the Pope in St Peter's Square. He was so overcome he reached out to grasp the papal hand and was rewarded with a blessing and a set of rosary beads from one of the priests in the Pontiff's retinue.

While calm in public, he has often blown up behind the scenes at reporters and is occasionally guilty of overdoing briefings.
In the last few weeks his public approach has changed, bluntly blaming the Portugese police for leaking statements from Mr and Mrs McCann that revealed Madeleine was left crying the night before she vanished.

Mitchell moved from the shadows to being branded a "manipulative liar" by the police and the row ensured once more that the McCanns returned to front pages across Europe. It was a job well done by the man at the centre of the story in his own right.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1902515/Master-of-media-circus-for-Madeleine-McCann.html

All for what I ask?

...... and they would cooperate with the police rather than campaigning against them!

F*****g t****rs .

Clarence Mitchell: 'I am a decent human being. If I can help them, I will'


The ex-BBC journalist built a career on professional detachment. Then, he went to work for the McCanns

• By Cole Morton
  
• Sunday 1 March 2009 00:00 GMT
  

The search goes on. "There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, nothing, to suggest that Madeleine has been harmed, let alone killed," insists Clarence Mitchell, the former television reporter who speaks for the family of the most famous missing girl in the world. Her face is instantly recognisable. There is no longer any need to use her surname, McCann. And yet, nearly two years since she vanished from the Algarve, there is still no trace.

This is hard to say to Mitchell – who began as a dispassionate adviser and then became a close personal friend of her parents – but there seems no evidence to suggest the three-year-old is still living. "Obviously," he says, "as time goes on, Kate and Gerry are finding it harder and harder. But they are still firmly of the view that Madeleine is alive and out there to be found."

For months now they have turned down interviews, preferring to go through the many files handed over by the Portuguese police. There is another reason for their silence, too. "You reach a saturation point," their spokesman admits. "People would say to us, 'Oh, it's tragic, but we've almost had enough of Madeleine.' That was appalling to hear."

In their silence, Clarence Mitchell is re-emerging as a public figure in his own right. On Friday he will speak at the Oxford Union, following in the footsteps of Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa and Kermit the Frog. Now he is giving his first personal interview since the days when he was a familiar face on the BBC. He is doing it at the West End offices of Freud Communications, which has hired him as a consultant. Dressed as if to broadcast, in a light brown suit and dark blue shirt, he has two BlackBerrys on his desk: one for Kate and Gerry, the other for everyone else.

Lately, he seems to be setting himself up as a public relations guru for families in distress, including that of 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen, who was stabbed to death in south London last year. The trial of Jimmy's alleged killer begins at the Old Bailey a week tomorrow, and Mitchell will be outside, representing the bereaved parents. Once again, he will be on our screens. But despite seeming so familiar, Clarence Mitchell has never really given anything away about himself. Why did he stop reporting and reading the news? What then drove this 46-year-old man to campaign on behalf of the McCanns, a couple he barely knew and who were suspected of murdering their daughter?

"Everything I have seen of them, in all of the pressurised situations, shows me a family who are suffering the loss of their child," he says. "Everything they are doing, behind the scenes, convinces me of that."

So far, so on message for a man who was hired in September 2007 to "salvage their reputations" in the wake of the McCanns being named as arguidos, or suspects, by the Portuguese police. Mitchell had already been with them for a month, as a civil service media expert sent to help the couple to cope with all the attention. But he returned in the pay of a millionaire supporter of the McCanns, leading a publicity campaign "to correct and balance the inaccurate coverage that was coming out and try to get everything back on an even keel ... with a view to helping to get arguido lifted".

It worked, of course: they won £550,000 damages and a front-page apology from the Daily Express, and last summer the police cleared them of all suspicion. But Mitchell could not have known it would turn out that way. "It was," he says, "gut instinct."

It was a life-changing moment. Until then, his entire career had been built on remaining calm and uninvolved in the most trying circumstances: reporting for the Hendon and Finchley Times with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher, bursting into the office; broadcasting from the M1 with the wreckage of the Kegworth air disaster strewn in front of him; covering wars in Northern Ireland, Kuwait, Iraq and the Balkans alongside the likes of Kate Adie. "You see a lot of distressing things, whether that's a war zone or a murder scene, but I have always found it relatively easy to be dispassionate."

He needed that skill most when sent on a story in Fulham in 1999. "There was a rumour that Jill Dando had been in some sort of accident. The area was taped off. There were detectives walking up from the house who told us to ring the press bureau. I said, 'Look, I know Jill.' We were friends. She used to called me Clarenzio. They said, 'She's dead, I'm afraid.' It was dreadful." But he still filed reports from the scene. "You just have to get on with it."

He did breakfast TV and the odd Six O'Clock News – "which nobody remembers" – but by the time he left the BBC in 2005, his career had reached a plateau. "I felt I had more to offer." Recruited by the Cabinet Office to run the Media Monitoring Unit, he had a hard first week. "The Monday was the G8 at Gleneagles. I was just about getting my head round the job on Tuesday, then Wednesday we won the Olympics. Thursday was 7/7." When the Foreign Office sent him to assist the McCanns – as he insists it would have helped any family in that situation – he asked difficult questions. "I was assured that from the perspective of the British authorities, this was a rare case of stranger abduction."

They had left their very young children alone in a holiday apartment while they went to a tapas bar. He doesn't duck that, even if the response has been smoothed by repetition. "They made a mistake at the time; they weren't with her when it happened. They will always regret that, God forbid, possibly for the rest of their lives."

In media terms, he says, Madeleine was "a perfect storm: her age, her appearance, the location, the parents..." Columnists wrote about "people like us". Picture editors loved Kate, to an extraordinary degree. "It would be sad if it wasn't laughable: Kate was finding herself in Nuts or whatever lads' magazine's top 10. You think, 'This is ridiculous.' But they can't help how they look."

There's no truth, then, in the report that he tried to get Kate to be photographed in a swimsuit? "Utter bollocks." Gerry suggested it without realising the implications, he says, and was then persuaded otherwise. "A good example of facts being distorted. Completely, 180-degree wrong."

Mitchell had a home in Bath with his wife and children, two girls and a boy who were aged 10, eight and one at the time. Why go back to Portugal? "We had become friends. There was an emotional drive. I felt they had been the victims of a heinous crime and very badly wronged in the way stories had appeared."

There was also his response as a father. "I have never had to analyse it like this before ... but yes, this was every parent's nightmare, my own included." Didn't he miss his own children? "At night, when I had a few hours to myself, you did miss them more acutely, perhaps, than if it had been a job of a different nature."

These days Mitchell gets 40 per cent of his former salary as a retainer from the Find Madeleine Fund. Kate is said by relatives to spend hours with the files at home in Rothley, Leicestershire, while her twins are at nursery. Gerry, devotes evenings to the case, after days as a consultant at Glenfield Hospital.

"Sadly, the files have not revealed any substantial new leads," says Mitchell. "And sadly, they have confirmed a lot of what Kate and Gerry feared: that things haven't been done properly in certain areas, and certain things hadn't been followed up." The detective agencies they hired are no longer on the case. Have a dozen British former detectives and security service agents been employed instead, as reported? "I can't go into details, because the investigators don't wish me to. The investigation is on a smaller scale, but just as relevant."

There is still a huge amount of material to work through: such as more than 3,000 "psychic tip-offs. Any verifiable fact in them – and some are very detailed – has to be checked".

Meanwhile, his new life involves media training for corporations as well as advising people such as the mother of Scarlett Keeling, who was murdered in Goa, and the Mizens. "I do it pro bono, for free." Why? "Because these people came to me in the direst of situations, with their children dead. I'm not going to say no. Nor am I going to say, 'I'm sorry about your loss. Here's my fee.'" Others would. "It's a non-starter. I am a decent, caring human being. If I can help them, I will."

Yes, but isn't he using this free work to build the kind of reputation that made him attractive to Freud? "Not deliberately so. Honestly." Others have compared the new Clarence Mitchell to a more obviously compassionate Max Clifford, with whom he says he gets on well. "People are entitled to their point of view," he says, as calmly as he says everything, on and off camera. "But I am doing this for what I believe to be honest, genuine, compassionate reasons."

The making of a media expert
From TV to Madeleine, and beyond
1962 Born and educated in north-west London. Tries working in a bank after school but hates it.
1982 Joins Hendon and Finchley Times as a trainee reporter, which brings him into contact with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher. "To see the Prime Minister sweep into the office with Special Branch while you are writing up the latest golden wedding is quite an experience."
1985 Shift work on Sunday Express.
1986 Joins the BBC in Sheffield as a radio reporter, before going on to television in Leeds with Look North.
1989 Breakfast News in London, then "fireman" sent where needed, including extensive war reporting.
1999 Made a BBC News presenter.
2005 Joins Civil Service as director of Downing St Media Monitoring Unit.
May 2007 Sent to Portugal to help with press attention in the McCann case.
September 2007 Quits the Civil Service to become spokesman for McCanns.
2008 Extends help to other families.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/clarence-mitchell-i-am-a-decent-human-being-if-i-can-help-them-i-will-1634738.html

How were Gerry and Kate McCann portrayed by the media?

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by style - June 23, 20160




The story that I’m analysing is the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and how the media presented her mother (Kate McCann) and whether or not she had a narrative shift from being the ‘hysterical woman’ to ‘a monster’. This story links in with how women criminals are presented, and whether or not they are presented in a certain way.

On the 3^rd May 2007 Madeleine McCann was kidnapped from her hotel room in Portugal. Madeleine and her two siblings were left alone, while their parents went and had dinner with friends 100 yards away from the McCann’s hotel room. There has been on going investigation and many leads, but Madeleine to this day has never been found, so no one is aware whether she’s alive or dead. Ever since the day Madeleine went missing the people of Britain have been obsessed about what really happened to her. At one point there was DNA traces found of her in the boot of Kate and Gerry McCann’s rental car, 5 weeks after she went missing, and there was accusations that the McCann’s could have killed their own daughter, but nothing was ever proven, due to the fact that only 88% of the DNA in the car was correct.

When the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was told to the public, it was an on-going story and still is with wide coverage. It was difficult to not see a front page without Madeleine’s face printed all over it, and everyone in Europe knows the name of Madeleine McCann. Even though she has never been found the stories are still carrying on with new leads and anniversaries of how long it’s been since she’s been missing. It is a story that the nation has become obsessed by, just like Princess Diana’s death when the whole nation grieved for someone they never actually knew. When the story emerged it was published everywhere using a whole range of media from: tabloids, broadcast, radio and online news, and it did in fact bring out people’s opinions on what they think of the McCann family and whether or not they think they’re hiding something. These speculations are still around today, and if it is discussed most people have a prediction of what they think happened to her. Not only this, but members of the public have also made it clear to the McCann’s about what they think, as they have received hate mail as well as sympathetic comments, in fact they even had their own Twitter troll at one point.

Therefore I have come up with two hypotheses about the McCann story and how the media presented Kate:

Hypothesis 1- Kate McCann was made out to be the ‘hysterical woman’ by the press.
Hypothesis 2- After DNA in the rental car was found Kate McCann was turned into ‘the monster’ by the press.
 
Hypothesis 1:
When women commit crimes, the media tend to present them in one of three ways: the subordinate of a male criminal mastermind, the hysterical woman and the monster. As Marsh and Melville explore: ‘ Often these stock stories come in the form of binary classifications steeped one hand is the Lady Macbeth figure (the unnatural monster and manipulator) or the Pygmalion; on the other hand is the dupe, the woman who is willing to do anything for love and resorts to killing as a way of cementing her relationship with a man Other narratives focus on the appearance and contrast ugly duckling with the femme fatale. Finally are those stories that focus on women’s biology and psychology ad emphasize the mad and the bad, which gives recourse to the so-called link between feminity and madness and evil.’ (Marsh and Melville, 2009) This means that often crime stories to do with women in the newspapers are often portrayed in a certain way, which can be because they go against gender stereotypes, and this is seen as more out the ordinary compared to when men commit crimes, as women are meant to be caring and nurturing creatures. Just like Jones and Wardles said: ‘Women only receive more lenient coverage if their crime is not violate gender stereotypes, and in fact women who commit violent crimes or crimes against children receive the harshest treatment of all.’ (Jones and Wardles, 2008) What Jones and Wardles are saying is that women who do commit crimes do tend to get more coverage, and if there are children involved the press tend to portray them worse to if there is a crime committed that does not involve children.

This hasn’t just happened in the McCann case it has also happened with Maxine Carr as Jones and Wardles said: ‘ We found disturbing evidence of newspaper formatting which could only encourage readers to draw misleading conclusions about Carr’s role.’ (Jones and Wardle, 2008) This means that the media did portray Maxine Carr into someone that committed the offence, even though she did not do it. This was clear because the media used her image on all of the headlines of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman it cause the public to hate Maxine more even though she wasn’t the one who committed the crime, and because of this she had to change her ID.

Therefore by looking at words that the journalist has used and how many times Kate has had negative press compared to Gerry, and how much the press have presented her to be ‘hysterical’ on some of the very first press releases about missing Madeleine McCann it will be made clear if my hypothesis is correct and whether Kate McCann really was made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ and whether her narrative did shift and the media presented her as more of a ‘monster’ when the DNA was suggested to be Madeleine’s in the boot of the rental car.





In the bar chart above I looked at the articles that were first published when Madeleine McCann went missing, between the dates of the 3^rd of May 2007 and the 5^th of May 2007. I decided to choose these dates, because it was when the event first happened, so I wanted to see how the press was portraying the McCann’s from the very beginning of the story. Therefore I collected 20 British newspaper articles that wrote specifically about the incident between these dates. While looking through the articles I discovered that Gerry McCann’s name was being mentioned a lot more compared to Kate’s, so I decided to start counting and comparing how many times he was mentioned and quoted in each article, while counting Kate McCann’s as well.

In the findings it is made clear that Gerry McCann is in fact mentioned a lot more than Kate McCann, as he is brought up 16 times, while Kate is only mentioned 3 times, and there is very little information on how she feels about the kidnaping of her daughter to begin with. However, this could have been because Kate was too upset to talk to the press about the situation, so instead Gerry spoke on behalf of both of them.

Newspaper	How they described Gerry
The Guardian	‘Fought back tears’
The Daily Star	—–
The Observer	‘extremely difficult time for the family’ ‘held his wife tightly’ ‘my brother was at his wits end’
Sunday Mail	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
Sunday Express	‘My brother is at his wits end’ ‘I mean, you can hear his voice breaking.’
Sunday Life	—–
The Sunday Times	‘‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Sunday Telegraph	‘She received a telephone call from her brother who was “hysterical and crying his eyes out”’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’ ‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Wales on Sunday	——
Aberdeen Press and Journal	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘Breaking his heart’
Birmingham Post	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Birmingham Evening Mail	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Coventry Evening Telegraph	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Daily Record	‘The phone went last night and it was my young brother distraught on the phone, breaking his heart.’
Daily Post	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘breaking his heart’
Daily Star	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Herald	Distraught” Mr and Mrs McCann read a statement to the press outside the resort last night.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Independent	—–
Leicester Mercury	—–
Yorkshire Post	‘Breaking his heart’

In the table above is a list of phrases each newspaper I looked at used. Each newspaper tended to use similar words and quotes, for instance The Guardian used: ‘fought back tears’ and The Sunday Telegraph used: ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’ While a few other newspapers used quotes from Gerry McCann’s sister saying that ‘It was breaking his heart’, for instance the Daily Post and Coventry Evening Telegraph. However, The Observer went with a different quote from Gerry’s sister ‘my brother was at his wits end’.

Therefore it is simple to conclude that through the use of language the newspapers presented about Gerry McCann and the amount of times he was described in the articles (from using quotes as well) it can be said that the media were looking to present him as slightly ‘hysterical’ in the very first articles published about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, you can see this by the use of language and quotes that the newspaper chose to use. It is clear that Kate McCann was rarely mentioned at all, but this could have been for a numerous amount of reasons, in fact some newspapers only quoted other members of Gerry’s family, but they never quoted any from Kate’s family.





By just using the previous information do decide whether or not Kate McCann was made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ by the press would have been unrepresented, as it only looked at the very first few days of Madeleine’s disappearance. Therefore I decided to look at different dates so in the bar chart just above is 20 newspaper articles from the dates of the 5^th of May 2007 and the 9^th of May 2007, I decided to look at these dates specifically because it was still shortly after the incident had occurred, and it was just past the dates that I looked at previously. I used the same procedure of counting how many times Kate McCann’s name was used compared to Gerry McCann’s, but I also added in a neutral column too, as some newspaper articles didn’t use quotes or descriptions of either of them, and simply just described the on-going situation.

It is clear from the statistics in the bar chart above that Kate McCann was being used as the main parent by the media, as she was mentioned in 17 of the newspaper articles out of the 20 I studied, while Gerry was not mentioned at all. Although, three of the newspapers didn’t seem to mention either of them very much, and their articles were more based on the facts and timeline of what had happened to Madeleine McCann the hours before and after her disappearance.

When it came down to looking at the use of language throughout the same articles it became more clear that the media portrayed Kate McCann as the ‘hysterical woman’. For instance the Daily Post said: ‘The mother of Madeleine McCann knelt and wept in the church yesterday, as she prayed for her safe return.’ While The Sun said: ‘Clutching her blonde daughter’s photo and favourite toy kitten, GP Kate urged Madeleine’s abductor: “Please, please, do not hurt her.”’ Many of the other newspapers I looked at used very similar quotes and descriptions, to make the public understand that this is a very distressing time for the McCann’s especially Kate as it’s her first daughter. This makes the audience feel more sympathetic towards Kate and makes them try to understand the emotions she’s going through by being more descriptive about Kate’s actions, for instance the word ‘clutching’ implies that she never wants to let go of the toy. If the journalist had just used ‘holding’ this wouldn’t have created much of an affect towards to public. This wasn’t just in one or two of the articles and there were at least more than two statements that made her seem like this character. So it seems like the media started to aim the story more around Kate and her emotions rather than Gerry and his.

To conclude it is clear that Kate McCann is made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ by the media as the situation of Madeleine McCann escalated this is clear by the amount of times she was mentioned throughout the newspapers, not only this but the use of language that the papers used as well, making the scenario more dramatic so the audience sympathised with Kate and what she was and still is going through. Although, it was also clear that the media focused on Gerry McCann when the story first came out, as most of the publicity was aimed at him, with not much mention of Kate at all until later on.

Hypothesis 2:
As the months went on Madeleine was still not found, and more evidence was concluding that Gerry and Kate McCann could have been involved with the disappearance of their daughter, as they were accused by the Portuguese police of doping their daughter up with sleeping pills, and maybe accidentally overdosing her and killing her. This wasn’t the only theory they had they also thought that Kate or Gerry McCann could have accidentally pushed her down the stairs. There was no evidence for this, and has never been, however there was DNA found in the boot of the McCann’s rental car that could have been Madeleine’s and there was a significant amount of it that was impossible to be just random bits of hair from Madeleine. Patching and Hirst quoted the parents:‘ They said that press coverage of their daughter’s disappearance was initially sympathetic but soon changed, with some articles implying the parents were “hiding something”.’(Patching and Hirst, 2013)This suggests that people were starting to think badly of the McCann’s and that there was more to meets the eye with the situation of Madeleine’s disappearance. When this was all coming out the Portuguese press accused Kate and Gerry McCann of killing her, even though the evidence wasn’t strong enough. One tabloid paper that done this was the Tal & Qual, and because they stood by what they said the McCann’s sued the paper in August 2007. Therefore I’ve also decided to look at how Kate McCann was presented by the media in the UK when the speculations of the DNA was found in the boot of the rental car, and to see if she was presented as a ‘monster’ just like Myra Hindley was when she it was uncovered that she was part of the moors murders.


 
In the bar chart above I looked at 25 different news articles from the 5^th of September 2007 to the 7^th of September 2007, this was when the story started to emerge about the suspected DNA of Madeleine McCann being found in the boot of the parents rental car. From this bar chart it is made clear that there is quite a difference between Kate getting accused more compared to Gerry, as 10 newspaper articles were aimed at Kate McCann, whereas none out the 25 that were studied were aimed at Gerry McCann ‘. Although, 11 were aimed at both of them, while 5 were not against the couple at all, and those newspapers were simply explaining the situation and went into more detail about the possibility of the DNA being Madeleine’s.

From this data it is quite clear that certain media publications want to aim the blame more around Kate rather than Gerry. This links back to the public seeing women as maternal caring creatures, as Marsh and Melville stated: ‘the acceptable female norm is closely linked to female biology. For example, women are seen to be closer to nature as they give birth and are subject to the menstrual cycle. It is widely assumed then that women are naturally caring, emotional and maternal.’(Marsh and Melville, 2009). This means that when women are portrayed as not being like this in the press (for instance the Maxine Carr case) it makes it more out of the ordinary to see a mother commit a serious offense; therefore the public are more intrigued to find out what happened and why it happened. Not only this, but the data also shows that some media publications also supported the McCann’s, by not accusing either one of them.

It is also made clear that certain newspapers were accusing Kate McCann of the murder of Madeleine McCann without even knowing if the evidence was going to be true or not. For instance several headlines were aimed at Kate, as The Mirror wrote: ‘Police Quiz Madeleine’s Mother’ while The Evening Standard wrote: ‘Maddy mother is questioned’. Although this wasn’t just in the headlines either as Sky News even explained how Kate McCann could have killed Madeleine, and created a fictional story around it ‘Portuguese detectives appear to be working on the theory that Mrs McCann killed her daughter by accident and covered up the death by claiming she was abducted.’ The reason why it wasn’t aimed at Gerry so much is because it wouldn’t have been so shocking to the public, as people can’t understand why women commit crimes, just like with the Myra Hindley case and the Maxine Carr case. Marsh and Melville state: ‘Women murderers will provide an interesting angle on the media’s representation of criminals… media discourses regarding women are guilty of ‘symbolic annihilation’, that is, the media ignore, trivialize or condemn women. In particular, this aspect of the media has an effect on the way that news about offending women is reported… This raises the question as to why the media seem to be more interested in female offenders than males.’(Marsh and Melville, 2009). Therefore this explains why the media portrayed the blame to be more on Kate rather than Gerry about the DNA being found in the boot of the McCann’s car.

Overall, even though Kate McCann was mentioned rarely in press releases during the first few days of her daughters disappearance it was made clear that Gerry was the one who the press was looking at the most, you can see this even by interviewing his family members rather than Kate’s. However, in the next few days after this it is easy to tell that the media changed who they were looking at and focused on Kate more, by the way the newspapers describe Kate you can clearly see this too, as they describe Kate’s actions for instance when The Sun said: ‘Clutching her blonde daughter’s photo and favourite toy kitten, GP Kate urged Madeleine’s abductor: “Please, please, do not hurt her.”’ However, as the months went on and the DNA was found in the boot of the McCann’s rental car it was more obvious that the press made a narrative shift and started portraying Kate as a suspect in her daughters disappearance, and it is clear that this was mainly aimed at Kate rather than Gerry, as the blame wasn’t singly blamed on him at all. Even in the headlines all the blame was aimed at Kate, for instance ‘Police Quiz Madeleine’s mother’ and ‘Maddy mother is questioned’. Even though they may have not been exactly portraying her as a ‘monster’ they were still changing the narrative and blaming Kate McCann for the disappearance of her daughter rather than Gerry, which can make the public think that she is guilty of the crime, and twist people’s thoughts into believing that she killed her daughter.

References
Marsh, I. and Melville, G. (2009) Crime, justice and the media. London: Routledge.
Patching, R. and Hirst, M. (2013) Journalism ethics: Arguments and cases for the twenty-first century. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Jones and Wardles (2008) No emotion, No sympathy; The Visual Construction of Maxine Carr.

http://www.lsbu-multimedia-journalists.co.uk/style/2016/06/how-were-gerry-and-kate-mccann-portrayed-by-the-media/

Verdi wrote:How were Gerry and Kate McCann portrayed by the media?

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by style - June 23, 20160




The story that I’m analysing is the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and how the media presented her mother (Kate McCann) and whether or not she had a narrative shift from being the ‘hysterical woman’ to ‘a monster’. This story links in with how women criminals are presented, and whether or not they are presented in a certain way.

On the 3^rd May 2007 Madeleine McCann was kidnapped from her hotel room in Portugal. Madeleine and her two siblings were left alone, while their parents went and had dinner with friends 100 yards away from the McCann’s hotel room. There has been on going investigation and many leads, but Madeleine to this day has never been found, so no one is aware whether she’s alive or dead. Ever since the day Madeleine went missing the people of Britain have been obsessed about what really happened to her. At one point there was DNA traces found of her in the boot of Kate and Gerry McCann’s rental car, 5 weeks after she went missing, and there was accusations that the McCann’s could have killed their own daughter, but nothing was ever proven, due to the fact that only 88% of the DNA in the car was correct.

When the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was told to the public, it was an on-going story and still is with wide coverage. It was difficult to not see a front page without Madeleine’s face printed all over it, and everyone in Europe knows the name of Madeleine McCann. Even though she has never been found the stories are still carrying on with new leads and anniversaries of how long it’s been since she’s been missing. It is a story that the nation has become obsessed by, just like Princess Diana’s death when the whole nation grieved for someone they never actually knew. When the story emerged it was published everywhere using a whole range of media from: tabloids, broadcast, radio and online news, and it did in fact bring out people’s opinions on what they think of the McCann family and whether or not they think they’re hiding something. These speculations are still around today, and if it is discussed most people have a prediction of what they think happened to her. Not only this, but members of the public have also made it clear to the McCann’s about what they think, as they have received hate mail as well as sympathetic comments, in fact they even had their own Twitter troll at one point.

Therefore I have come up with two hypotheses about the McCann story and how the media presented Kate:

Hypothesis 1- Kate McCann was made out to be the ‘hysterical woman’ by the press.
Hypothesis 2- After DNA in the rental car was found Kate McCann was turned into ‘the monster’ by the press.
 
Hypothesis 1:
When women commit crimes, the media tend to present them in one of three ways: the subordinate of a male criminal mastermind, the hysterical woman and the monster. As Marsh and Melville explore: ‘ Often these stock stories come in the form of binary classifications steeped one hand is the Lady Macbeth figure (the unnatural monster and manipulator) or the Pygmalion; on the other hand is the dupe, the woman who is willing to do anything for love and resorts to killing as a way of cementing her relationship with a man Other narratives focus on the appearance and contrast ugly duckling with the femme fatale. Finally are those stories that focus on women’s biology and psychology ad emphasize the mad and the bad, which gives recourse to the so-called link between feminity and madness and evil.’ (Marsh and Melville, 2009) This means that often crime stories to do with women in the newspapers are often portrayed in a certain way, which can be because they go against gender stereotypes, and this is seen as more out the ordinary compared to when men commit crimes, as women are meant to be caring and nurturing creatures. Just like Jones and Wardles said: ‘Women only receive more lenient coverage if their crime is not violate gender stereotypes, and in fact women who commit violent crimes or crimes against children receive the harshest treatment of all.’ (Jones and Wardles, 2008) What Jones and Wardles are saying is that women who do commit crimes do tend to get more coverage, and if there are children involved the press tend to portray them worse to if there is a crime committed that does not involve children.

This hasn’t just happened in the McCann case it has also happened with Maxine Carr as Jones and Wardles said: ‘ We found disturbing evidence of newspaper formatting which could only encourage readers to draw misleading conclusions about Carr’s role.’ (Jones and Wardle, 2008) This means that the media did portray Maxine Carr into someone that committed the offence, even though she did not do it. This was clear because the media used her image on all of the headlines of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman it cause the public to hate Maxine more even though she wasn’t the one who committed the crime, and because of this she had to change her ID.

Therefore by looking at words that the journalist has used and how many times Kate has had negative press compared to Gerry, and how much the press have presented her to be ‘hysterical’ on some of the very first press releases about missing Madeleine McCann it will be made clear if my hypothesis is correct and whether Kate McCann really was made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ and whether her narrative did shift and the media presented her as more of a ‘monster’ when the DNA was suggested to be Madeleine’s in the boot of the rental car.





In the bar chart above I looked at the articles that were first published when Madeleine McCann went missing, between the dates of the 3^rd of May 2007 and the 5^th of May 2007. I decided to choose these dates, because it was when the event first happened, so I wanted to see how the press was portraying the McCann’s from the very beginning of the story. Therefore I collected 20 British newspaper articles that wrote specifically about the incident between these dates. While looking through the articles I discovered that Gerry McCann’s name was being mentioned a lot more compared to Kate’s, so I decided to start counting and comparing how many times he was mentioned and quoted in each article, while counting Kate McCann’s as well.

In the findings it is made clear that Gerry McCann is in fact mentioned a lot more than Kate McCann, as he is brought up 16 times, while Kate is only mentioned 3 times, and there is very little information on how she feels about the kidnaping of her daughter to begin with. However, this could have been because Kate was too upset to talk to the press about the situation, so instead Gerry spoke on behalf of both of them.

Newspaper	How they described Gerry
The Guardian	‘Fought back tears’
The Daily Star	—–
The Observer	‘extremely difficult time for the family’ ‘held his wife tightly’ ‘my brother was at his wits end’
Sunday Mail	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
Sunday Express	‘My brother is at his wits end’ ‘I mean, you can hear his voice breaking.’
Sunday Life	—–
The Sunday Times	‘‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Sunday Telegraph	‘She received a telephone call from her brother who was “hysterical and crying his eyes out”’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’ ‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Wales on Sunday	——
Aberdeen Press and Journal	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘Breaking his heart’
Birmingham Post	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Birmingham Evening Mail	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Coventry Evening Telegraph	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’
Daily Record	‘The phone went last night and it was my young brother distraught on the phone, breaking his heart.’
Daily Post	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘breaking his heart’
Daily Star	‘Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Herald	Distraught” Mr and Mrs McCann read a statement to the press outside the resort last night.’ ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’
The Independent	—–
Leicester Mercury	—–
Yorkshire Post	‘Breaking his heart’

In the table above is a list of phrases each newspaper I looked at used. Each newspaper tended to use similar words and quotes, for instance The Guardian used: ‘fought back tears’ and The Sunday Telegraph used: ‘We cannot describe the anguish and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.’ While a few other newspapers used quotes from Gerry McCann’s sister saying that ‘It was breaking his heart’, for instance the Daily Post and Coventry Evening Telegraph. However, The Observer went with a different quote from Gerry’s sister ‘my brother was at his wits end’.

Therefore it is simple to conclude that through the use of language the newspapers presented about Gerry McCann and the amount of times he was described in the articles (from using quotes as well) it can be said that the media were looking to present him as slightly ‘hysterical’ in the very first articles published about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, you can see this by the use of language and quotes that the newspaper chose to use. It is clear that Kate McCann was rarely mentioned at all, but this could have been for a numerous amount of reasons, in fact some newspapers only quoted other members of Gerry’s family, but they never quoted any from Kate’s family.





By just using the previous information do decide whether or not Kate McCann was made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ by the press would have been unrepresented, as it only looked at the very first few days of Madeleine’s disappearance. Therefore I decided to look at different dates so in the bar chart just above is 20 newspaper articles from the dates of the 5^th of May 2007 and the 9^th of May 2007, I decided to look at these dates specifically because it was still shortly after the incident had occurred, and it was just past the dates that I looked at previously. I used the same procedure of counting how many times Kate McCann’s name was used compared to Gerry McCann’s, but I also added in a neutral column too, as some newspaper articles didn’t use quotes or descriptions of either of them, and simply just described the on-going situation.

It is clear from the statistics in the bar chart above that Kate McCann was being used as the main parent by the media, as she was mentioned in 17 of the newspaper articles out of the 20 I studied, while Gerry was not mentioned at all. Although, three of the newspapers didn’t seem to mention either of them very much, and their articles were more based on the facts and timeline of what had happened to Madeleine McCann the hours before and after her disappearance.

When it came down to looking at the use of language throughout the same articles it became more clear that the media portrayed Kate McCann as the ‘hysterical woman’. For instance the Daily Post said: ‘The mother of Madeleine McCann knelt and wept in the church yesterday, as she prayed for her safe return.’ While The Sun said: ‘Clutching her blonde daughter’s photo and favourite toy kitten, GP Kate urged Madeleine’s abductor: “Please, please, do not hurt her.”’ Many of the other newspapers I looked at used very similar quotes and descriptions, to make the public understand that this is a very distressing time for the McCann’s especially Kate as it’s her first daughter. This makes the audience feel more sympathetic towards Kate and makes them try to understand the emotions she’s going through by being more descriptive about Kate’s actions, for instance the word ‘clutching’ implies that she never wants to let go of the toy. If the journalist had just used ‘holding’ this wouldn’t have created much of an affect towards to public. This wasn’t just in one or two of the articles and there were at least more than two statements that made her seem like this character. So it seems like the media started to aim the story more around Kate and her emotions rather than Gerry and his.

To conclude it is clear that Kate McCann is made out to be an ‘hysterical woman’ by the media as the situation of Madeleine McCann escalated this is clear by the amount of times she was mentioned throughout the newspapers, not only this but the use of language that the papers used as well, making the scenario more dramatic so the audience sympathised with Kate and what she was and still is going through. Although, it was also clear that the media focused on Gerry McCann when the story first came out, as most of the publicity was aimed at him, with not much mention of Kate at all until later on.

Hypothesis 2:
As the months went on Madeleine was still not found, and more evidence was concluding that Gerry and Kate McCann could have been involved with the disappearance of their daughter, as they were accused by the Portuguese police of doping their daughter up with sleeping pills, and maybe accidentally overdosing her and killing her. This wasn’t the only theory they had they also thought that Kate or Gerry McCann could have accidentally pushed her down the stairs. There was no evidence for this, and has never been, however there was DNA found in the boot of the McCann’s rental car that could have been Madeleine’s and there was a significant amount of it that was impossible to be just random bits of hair from Madeleine. Patching and Hirst quoted the parents:‘ They said that press coverage of their daughter’s disappearance was initially sympathetic but soon changed, with some articles implying the parents were “hiding something”.’(Patching and Hirst, 2013)This suggests that people were starting to think badly of the McCann’s and that there was more to meets the eye with the situation of Madeleine’s disappearance. When this was all coming out the Portuguese press accused Kate and Gerry McCann of killing her, even though the evidence wasn’t strong enough. One tabloid paper that done this was the Tal & Qual, and because they stood by what they said the McCann’s sued the paper in August 2007. Therefore I’ve also decided to look at how Kate McCann was presented by the media in the UK when the speculations of the DNA was found in the boot of the rental car, and to see if she was presented as a ‘monster’ just like Myra Hindley was when she it was uncovered that she was part of the moors murders.


 
In the bar chart above I looked at 25 different news articles from the 5^th of September 2007 to the 7^th of September 2007, this was when the story started to emerge about the suspected DNA of Madeleine McCann being found in the boot of the parents rental car. From this bar chart it is made clear that there is quite a difference between Kate getting accused more compared to Gerry, as 10 newspaper articles were aimed at Kate McCann, whereas none out the 25 that were studied were aimed at Gerry McCann ‘. Although, 11 were aimed at both of them, while 5 were not against the couple at all, and those newspapers were simply explaining the situation and went into more detail about the possibility of the DNA being Madeleine’s.

From this data it is quite clear that certain media publications want to aim the blame more around Kate rather than Gerry. This links back to the public seeing women as maternal caring creatures, as Marsh and Melville stated: ‘the acceptable female norm is closely linked to female biology. For example, women are seen to be closer to nature as they give birth and are subject to the menstrual cycle. It is widely assumed then that women are naturally caring, emotional and maternal.’(Marsh and Melville, 2009). This means that when women are portrayed as not being like this in the press (for instance the Maxine Carr case) it makes it more out of the ordinary to see a mother commit a serious offense; therefore the public are more intrigued to find out what happened and why it happened. Not only this, but the data also shows that some media publications also supported the McCann’s, by not accusing either one of them.

It is also made clear that certain newspapers were accusing Kate McCann of the murder of Madeleine McCann without even knowing if the evidence was going to be true or not. For instance several headlines were aimed at Kate, as The Mirror wrote: ‘Police Quiz Madeleine’s Mother’ while The Evening Standard wrote: ‘Maddy mother is questioned’. Although this wasn’t just in the headlines either as Sky News even explained how Kate McCann could have killed Madeleine, and created a fictional story around it ‘Portuguese detectives appear to be working on the theory that Mrs McCann killed her daughter by accident and covered up the death by claiming she was abducted.’ The reason why it wasn’t aimed at Gerry so much is because it wouldn’t have been so shocking to the public, as people can’t understand why women commit crimes, just like with the Myra Hindley case and the Maxine Carr case. Marsh and Melville state: ‘Women murderers will provide an interesting angle on the media’s representation of criminals… media discourses regarding women are guilty of ‘symbolic annihilation’, that is, the media ignore, trivialize or condemn women. In particular, this aspect of the media has an effect on the way that news about offending women is reported… This raises the question as to why the media seem to be more interested in female offenders than males.’(Marsh and Melville, 2009). Therefore this explains why the media portrayed the blame to be more on Kate rather than Gerry about the DNA being found in the boot of the McCann’s car.

Overall, even though Kate McCann was mentioned rarely in press releases during the first few days of her daughters disappearance it was made clear that Gerry was the one who the press was looking at the most, you can see this even by interviewing his family members rather than Kate’s. However, in the next few days after this it is easy to tell that the media changed who they were looking at and focused on Kate more, by the way the newspapers describe Kate you can clearly see this too, as they describe Kate’s actions for instance when The Sun said: ‘Clutching her blonde daughter’s photo and favourite toy kitten, GP Kate urged Madeleine’s abductor: “Please, please, do not hurt her.”’ However, as the months went on and the DNA was found in the boot of the McCann’s rental car it was more obvious that the press made a narrative shift and started portraying Kate as a suspect in her daughters disappearance, and it is clear that this was mainly aimed at Kate rather than Gerry, as the blame wasn’t singly blamed on him at all. Even in the headlines all the blame was aimed at Kate, for instance ‘Police Quiz Madeleine’s mother’ and ‘Maddy mother is questioned’. Even though they may have not been exactly portraying her as a ‘monster’ they were still changing the narrative and blaming Kate McCann for the disappearance of her daughter rather than Gerry, which can make the public think that she is guilty of the crime, and twist people’s thoughts into believing that she killed her daughter.

References
Marsh, I. and Melville, G. (2009) Crime, justice and the media. London: Routledge.
Patching, R. and Hirst, M. (2013) Journalism ethics: Arguments and cases for the twenty-first century. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Jones and Wardles (2008) No emotion, No sympathy; The Visual Construction of Maxine Carr.

http://www.lsbu-multimedia-journalists.co.uk/style/2016/06/how-were-gerry-and-kate-mccann-portrayed-by-the-media/

‘One tabloid paper that done this.....’ hmmm, no points for grammar there, dear, and this is supposed to be an academic piece. 
Anyway, as I sigh, groan and roll my eyes heavenward, I would like to remind the writer that women who harm children are indeed viewed as monsters, but so are men, and rightly so, in both cases. Please leave your boring feminist agenda out of this, it will not not help anyone find out what happened to this little girl.

I can't recall if this nonsense published last month has already been posted up but just in case it was missed..


Madeleine McCann breakthrough: Cops track WIDOW who may hold key to case



A MYSTERY woman is being treated as a “critical” witness by Madeleine McCann cops – who could help solve the case.

By Tom Towers / Published 8th October 2017

Officers believe the woman – thought to be Eastern European – could be the missing link in the search for Maddie.

She reportedly lived near the McCann’s family home in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when the three-year-old disappeared in May 2007.

She then supposedly left the country after her husband’s death.

A source told The Sun: “She may have seen or heard something which to her may seem insignificant but to us could prove vital. If she recognises herself she should contact police."

She was reportedly described as “a critical line of enquiry.”

Scotland Yard’s £12 million hunt for Maddie – Operation Grange – has now been handed another £154,000 as cops try to track the witness.

The Home Office also gave the Metropolitan Police another £85,000 in March to extend its investigation.

Maddie's former GP mum Kate, 49, and heart specialist dad Gerry, 48, said they were “incredibly grateful” the police search would continue.

Cops may also re-interview key witnesses, it has been claimed.

A senior officer believes original statements given to Portuguese detectives were lost in translation.

British detectives have neither interviewed Maddie's parents nor the seven friends they were dining with in a tapas bar when she vanished.

Ex-Met Det Chief Inspector Colin Sutton said: “I would conduct fresh interviews with all the key British witnesses.

“We’re talking about interviews given through an interpreter, written down in Portuguese and then translated back into English so officers from Grange can read them.

“The room for error would be enormous.”

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/650708/Madeleine-McCann-news-parents-2017-latest-search-critical-witness-funding-Operation-Grange

You couldn't make it up could you - but hang on a minute, they did didn't they?  A classic case of what you don't know just invent.

Anthony Trollope created a Tom Towers, editor of the Jupiter (The Times), for The Warden, first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.  He was a ruthless cad who could make or break at the stroke of a quill (excuse the pun) - a sort of former day Murdoch.  Clearly this Tom Towers doesn't follow his namesake.

Yes it was posted

Good

What a wholly misleading headline that was written by Martin Fricker and printed in 2010!

Not only did GA NOT say a vile four-letter word (and I know they were made to issue an apology) - it translated as "talk to the McCanns" and not "F*** the McCanns", BUT he had already been removed from the investigation and was retired so why should he have been "finding missing Maddy" in 2010?