Paulo Reis: The “creativity” of Grant Hodgson, from the “Daily Mirror”

The “creativity” of Grant Hodgson, from the “Daily Mirror”



At the end of May 2007, I decided to create a blog, "Madeleine McCann Disappearance", in English, to "disassemble" the inaccuracies and falsifications reported by the UK Press. In the following months, I received dozens of emails from British journalists seeking information on the case.



I always answered them in the same way, saying that if I had the information they were looking for, I will have published on my blog, we ended up swapping our mobile numbers and talking to each other regularly. At the end of September, Grant Hodgson asked me what I thought of the countless sightings of Madeleine, particularly in Morocco. I told him that, in my opinion it was a kind of collective psychosis, due to a state of anxiety, created for the people by the excesses of the media campaign about the search for Madeleine McCann.I gave him the example of what had happened in Portugal, mentioned by the president of the Association of Inspectors of the PJ, Carlos Anjos, in an interview with RTP, on September 11, 2007. Since May, PJ had received 252 telephone calls from people who claimed to have seen Maddie in our national territory.Grant Hodgson, from the "Daily Mirror," had a different approach. I was asked questions about matters related to the case, such as what exactly was the "law of secrecy of justice", which caused so much confusion to British journalists.



The PJ, as Carlos Anjos stressed at the time, instructed PSP and GNR to send patrols to these 252 sites, mostly in the north of the country, to investigate the sightings. In every case, it came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, a child of the same age, blond and blue-eyed, but that it was not, of course, Maddie.To my astonishment, the day after this conversation, Grant Hodgson signed an article in the "Daily Mirror" which stated that the newspaper had found that "252 possible clues about the four-year-old child had been reported to [Gonçalo] Amaral, each one of them giving a location. But the vast majority [of these clues] were not investigated. That is to say, the English journalist wrote exactly the opposite of what I had told him in the telephone conversation, in an deliberate manipulation and distortion of the concrete facts that I had communicated to him. Of course, there was no more conversations between us.

Publicada por Pauo Reis

https://gazetadigitalmadeleinecase.blogspot.com/