The Jersey child abuse affair arrived in a blaze of headlines, but three months have passed and there is little sign of progress. Did the news media get it wrong?
If you had said in early March that the Jersey child abuse investigation would slip out of the headlines within a few weeks without any big new discoveries or significant arrests, you would probably not have been believed.
At that time the search at Haut de la Garenne was front-page, top-of-the-bulletin news. Hidden cellars were being opened, suspect items and graffiti had been found, the sniffer dog was picking up smells and dozens of new witnesses were coming forward. Almost everything we read and heard, in other words, suggested that a climax to the drama, a sort of news catharsis, was imminent.
Instead, we have had what appears to be a long anticlimax, with only the occasional minor item - the finding of a tooth, for example - making it into the news-in-brief columns. All the sound and fury seem to have signified almost nothing, thus far at least.
Is this another instance of pack journalism hysterically inflating a molehill of evidence into a mountain? Or is it a case of a senior detective - Jersey's deputy police chief Lenny Harper - unwisely precipitating a public panic akin to the Salem witch-hunt?
Nick Davies, author of the book Flat Earth News, a thunderous assault on the state of British journalism, has argued in the Guardian that it was the former. After interviewing Harper and analysing the coverage, he concluded that this was an example of "the commercialised media's in-built preference for certainty over doubt; for fitting facts into fictional templates; for taking the safe road of running the same angle as the rest of the media; and, most of all, for running stories that sell".
Davies explained that, by announcing last February the discovery of "what appears to be partial remains of a child", Harper naively provided the media with a licence to do their worst, and that is what they did, immediately conjuring up unsubstantiated notions of torture chambers and multiple murder.
It is no surprise that the press in general did not embrace Davies's view, and now the Daily Mail and its Sunday sister have jumped the other way: they have begun to blame the detective.
A report in the Mail on Sunday on 18 May, by David Rose, revealed that scientists who examined the "partial remains" that prompted February's excitements - in reality one small fragment - concluded in March that it was a piece of wood or shell. And Harper had "consistently failed to mention the vital results in public statements since the tests were completed".
Rose also suggested that the flow of witness evidence of abuse at Haut de la Garenne, which Harper says vindicates his decision to go public, may not be all it seems since many of the new witnesses have criminal records and are hoping to benefit financially through claims for damages. A headline in the Daily Mail the next day summed it up: "Jersey probe farce".
Harper defended his inquiry, insisting that the story of the fragment was more complicated than Rose suggested, and that in any case it had been ruled out of the inquiry "because of the archaeological context in which it had been found".
What are we to think? When I wrote about this case in early March I was struck by the degree to which the press were doing what the police wanted: not only were they flushing out new witnesses, but in most cases they were passing them on without publishing what they said - just as the police requested.
Yes, some of the reporting was nonsense, as Davies says, but that appeared to be a price Harper was prepared to pay for the publicity he sought for his investigation.
It is a matter of trust. The news media trusted and for the most part continues to trust Harper when he insists that he is unravelling an appalling scandal for which people will eventually go to jail. And they have given that trust even though he has produced very little in the way of evidence - he says that in such a case he can't do that.
Whether this trust is justified we cannot be certain until the matter comes to trial, but Harper must know that the longer that takes, the weaker it will become. Among the vices of the commercial media which Nick Davies did not list are impatience and vengefulness.
Delay that drop
Long ago I was told that the first paragraph of a news story was like the whore's smile: if it doesn't work, the reader swiftly takes his business elsewhere. They clearly have other ideas at the Guardian, where prolixity, atmospherics and the teasing "delayed drop" are all the rage.
A recent news story meandered through four long paragraphs (that's seven sentences, including two in italics and one in brackets) before grudgingly revealing that it was about the sale of some William McGonagall poems. By then, there were only two more paragraphs left to read. Not so much a smile; more like raising two fingers.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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