Chapter 17 – Is it a Lobby? It’s certainly not people.

Chapter 17 – Is it a Lobby? It’s certainly not people.

When someone is charged by the State with the mission of investigating a crime, one should do it properly and with exemption, and above everything, not assume any preconceived notions about the events. This was precisely what happened in the case of the disappearance of Madeleine. All the investigation lines were followed until exhaustion, progressively, from the most obvious ones to the most complex. Nobody looked at a predetermined result, or subjected the information that kept arriving, to that same result. That is why the investigation has been ongoing for such a long time.

When someone has the duty to inform the other citizens about certain events of public life, one cannot take sides with anyone. Opinions can not, or rather should not, be manipulated to serve someone’s interest. Those are the general principles of information, but their practice reveals itself quite different. This case was the perfect example for that.

Most of the Portuguese media reported the events, published new information about the case, and fulfilled its informative role, at the end. In Great Britain, things were done another way. Most of the English journalists, with their media under the control of higher powers, provoked national reactions with less favorable comments about the Portuguese populations and its institutions, using literally anything to make three main notions prevail: that Madeleine had been abducted during her sleep; that the parents were completely innocent of anything that was related to that; that the Policia Judiciaria was composed of a band of incompetent drunks, who didn’t know the first thing about criminal investigation.

In fact, those who could manifest their opinion about the competence of the PJ were precisely the English policemen who had followed the work since its early days, and from those, until today, nothing was heard but compliments about the Portuguese investigators.

The choir of the English journalists was so well orchestrated, that people started believing that it was a lobby, not organized by the media, but by higher powers.

At some point, the insidiousness reached such a level that the investigators themselves started to ask whether the English media were being used as the voice of someone invisible, so unanimous and fierce was the defense of one single opinion. The rumors about bribes offered by the British media to inhabitants of Praia da Luz and to Portuguese journalists, in order to publish certain news and to silence others, only inflamed the spirits on both sides.

Anything that carried ideas that were contrary to the British perspective was immediately contradicted and distanced from the information services. On the other hand, anything that in any way contributed to promote the image of the Portuguese sardine eater, drunk, incompetent and lazy, was made into the news of the day.