Media
Keeping Madeleine's profile high
Published 28 May 2007
Alastair Campbell may not be involved, but the news management in Praia da Luz has been as sophisticated as any we have seen
Whatever else the coverage of the abduction of Madeleine McCann may have been, it has rarely, since the first day or two, been real news reporting. Every now and then, when a paper has recapped the facts of the case, you could see how pitifully few those facts were, and so how few actual news stories there have been along the way.
The child was taken, and ten days later Robert Murat was questioned and then freed, though he remained officially a suspect. That was it, really. Pretty well all the rest, filling page after page and bulletin after bulletin, week upon week, has been something other than news.
That doesn't mean it wasn't journalism. It is a fact of modern life that only a minority of the articles on your news pages deliver real news in the sense of stories whose central facts are new to the reader. Follow-up or secondary stories composed of colour, reaction, speculation, background and sundry insights are an essential part of the business.
In the McCann case, some of these secondary stories have arisen spontaneously, as when a Norwegian woman reported seeing a distressed blonde girl in Marrakesh, or when commercial "find Madeleine" websites began to appear, cashing in on concern. Other stories were conjured up by newspapers eager for something to print. They chipped in on the reward, facilitated special appeals (David Beckham's, for example) and, in familiar, formulaic style, cast doubt on the competence of the local police.
This much is routine on a big story. But one thing that makes the Madeleine McCann affair truly exceptional is the number of secondary stories generated by the McCann family themselves and their advisers. To an extraordinary extent, in fact, this story has been managed by its central characters.
We saw this when the couple released a diary of their typical day in Praia da Luz. The diary itself was a story - "an emotional glimpse into their desperate world", as the Sunday Mirror had it - and with it came photographs of the parents and twins playing and eating together - the first pictures from inside the resort apartment.
Among the details of their schedule, we read that the morning hours when the twins were at the kids' club were devoted to "meetings with our press officer, Mark Warner reps, occasionally consulate staff, lawyers and British liaison officers". They also contacted family and friends in Britain to discuss "how to keep Madeleine's profile high".
Their success in doing this has been astonishing, and adds up to a feat of crime publicity probably unprecedented in Europe. Their initiatives, appearances and statements, and those of their relatives and friends in Britain, have been brilliantly judged and paced to keep the story prominent, long after a fickle press would normally have lost interest.
The release of that diary was an example. The third round of Sunday newspapers since the abduction was about to appear and something special was needed; they supplied it and the result was prominent coverage right across the press. Another example of this shrewdness is that they have avoided exclusives, which make you enemies as surely as they make you friends - ask Faye Turney.
Most strikingly, though, the couple established a direct bond with the public, making readers and viewers feel they had a role to play in the story, and it is probably this that kept journalists, who would not wish to upset those readers and viewers, on their best behaviour for so long.
Alastair Campbell may be nowhere about, but this is, if not spin, then highly sophisticated news management.
Let us not exaggerate: the McCanns alone could not have conjured up a news phenomenon on the scale we have seen. Big cultural forces of the Diana kind have clearly been at work, which are beyond the understanding of spin doctors and editors. The McCanns, as determined as they are desperate, have harnessed those forces with great skill.
We name the guilty parties
Seventy-eight Labour MPs voted in favour of David Maclean's squalid bill to exempt parliament from the Freedom of Information Act, though the Hansard record shows that not one could find a single word to say in justification.
No doubt they counted on relative anonymity, with Maclean, a Tory, serving as the lightning rod for public odium. Congratulations, then, to the Daily Mail for finding room for all 78 names in a "roll of dishonour".
They include Caroline Flint, Phil Woolas, David Lammy, Ian McCartney, Tony McNulty, Alun Michael, Elliot Morley, Stephen Pound and Angela and Maria Eagle. And below we give you the complete list.If you come across any of them, please do your best to make them feel ashamed.
Ainsworth, Bob
Allen, Graham
Anderson, Janet
Bailey, Adrian
Bell, Sir Stuart
Betts, Clive
Blackman, Liz
Brown, Nicholas
Burgon, Colin
Cairns, David
Campbell, Alan
Campbell, Ronnie
Clelland, David
Cohen, Harry
David, Wayne
Dhanda, Parmjit
Donohoe, Brian H.
Doran, Frank
Dowd, Jim
Eagle, Angela
Eagle, Maria
Efford, Clive
Fitzpatrick, Jim
Flint, Caroline
Foster, Michael (Worcester)
Hall, Mike
Harris, Tom
Henderson, Doug
Heppell, John
Hill, Keith
Irranca-Davies, Huw
Jones, Kevan
Jones, Martyn
Kemp, Fraser
Lammy, David
Laxton, Bob
Levitt, Tom
Lewis, Ivan
Lloyd, Tony
McAvoy, Thomas
McCabe, Steve
McCartney, Ian
McFall, John
McIsaac, Shona
McNulty, Tony
Mahmood, Khalid
Marshall, David
Merron, Gillian
Michael, Alun
Moffatt, Laura
Morley, Elliot
Mudie, George
Munn, Meg
Murphy, Denis
Plaskitt, James
Pound, Stephen
Purchase, Ken
Robertson, John
Roy, Frank
Ryan, Joan
Salter, Martin
Shaw, Jonathan
Sheridan, Jim
Simon, Siôn
Smith, Angela C. (Sheffield, Hillsborough)
Snelgrove, Anne
Spellar, John
Stewart, Ian
Tami, Mark
Taylor, Dari
Thomas, Gareth
Turner, Desmond
Ward, Claire
Watson, Tom
Watts, Dave
Wicks, Malcolm
Woolas, Phil
Wright, David
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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