How the press get the story ....a study

Hope I'm not boring you all?. This is a case study about the press persuing unethical practices in 2 famous cases Jon Benet Ramsey and Madeleine (interesting how he claims press got the stories!). Go to read Jon Benet @

http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_3_No_15_August_2013/1.pdf

2.2 The Case of Madeleine McCann
Madeleine (Maddie) McCann, a young English girl, went missing from a holiday apartment in Portugal on May 3rd 2007 sometime between about 8 pm and 10pm. By the following day at least one detective was telling journalists that there were doubts about whether Madeleine had really been abducted and that “police thought the couple were not telling the truth...” (Chrisman, 2007). The story appeared the following day, Saturday May 5, in the respected Portuguese newspaper, Diario de Noticias. The story, headlined “This Is A Very Badly Told Story,” had been written by Jose Manuel Oliveira who had received an off the record briefing by one of the top investigators of the Policia Judiciaria ( PJ ), the Portuguese criminal investigation police and said that “the headline/quote is based on the police and PJ sense that the testimonies gathered from the initial questioning of the McCanns, friends, and staff of the Ocean Club were confusing.
Oliveira believes this report was leaked because the PJ were beginning to have ‘doubts’ about the McCanns – that they were somehow connected or they knew someone who had had something to do with her disappearance – not at this stage that she might be dead. Astonishingly Oliveria says he got the information from the PJ for this leak by 5pm., on the 4th May – less than 24 hours after Maddie disappeared...” ( Chrisman, 2007). This was immediately denied by the JP, but on the 7th May Diario de Noticias published an article headlined “Police clues points to Madeleine’s death,” with an inside page headline “Port authority already looking for Madeleine’s body,” citing “police sources.”
At the same time another paper was reporting that police suspicions were based on the couple’s behavior, and one said that detectives “suspected them because their wives said Kate was too controlled to be the distraught mother” while another claimed forensic scientists reported that her controlled public appearance and make up indicated a “cold and manipulative” personality. This narrative was unfolding at a time when Maddie’s disappearance could still be counted in hours.
By May 7 numerous Portuguese papers were now openly pointing the finger of suspicion at the McCanns, and reporting that the police believed Maddie was dead. “24 Horas” reported that the police were now examining the past of the McCanns. Diario de Noticias headlined an article, “Police clues points to Maddie’s death” for a story based on “police sources.” On May 11 newspapers cited “police sources” as saying that there had been “seven days of contradictions” in what the McCanns and their friends had been saying. On May 13, Jose Barra de Costa, who had spent thirty years with the PJ, with experience in homicide, armed robbery and sexual crimes, and was now a university professor of criminology with Lusofona University and a lecturer at the Police Institute – that is, “an expert” – said:
“...I am informed by people in the know, that Madeleine’s parents dedicated themselves in the practice of swinging and that this activity could be related to the disappearance of the child. By nature, a relationship of swinging is promiscuous and atypical and can therefore have an involvement and exchange of relationships leading to an act of revenge, which could have resulted in the disappearance of the child.
Q- Who are these people in the know?
A -I cannot reveal my source, otherwise I would risk losing it...” (Costa, 2007).
In the weeks after the disappearance the McCanns travelled extensively in the hope of keeping the story alive on the grounds that if they didn’t it would go cold and people would stop looking – they clung to the hope that she was still alive.
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They even met with the Pope at the Vatican, who promised to pray for her safe return. Numerous politicians, celebrities and sports stars expressed their “concern” for “our Maddie.” However, the McCann’s campaign to keep the story alive would prove what some might take to be disastrous. The accusations that were alive in Portugal had not really taken hold elsewhere. That changed when at a press conference they were giving in Berlin on 6th June, 2007, a German journalist, Sabine Muller, asked them:
“How do you feel that more and more people feel the way you behaved was not the way people would normally behave when a child is abducted...they seem to imply that you might have something to do with it?” The journalist Jose Oliveira would later say: “It was clear that the police genuinely believed the couple were involved and were leaking stories in an attempt to put pressure on them...in the hope that they might confess or inform on each other...” (Oliveira, 2007).
It was at this moment that the story of Maddie’s disappearance and what role the McCann’s and their friends might have played shifted to a whole new level. The frenzied “feral beasts,” to use Tony Blair’s famous phrase about British tabloid journalists, saw that here was a story that would pump circulation and ratings. However, there was nothing the McCann’s, who had sought to use the media to help find her, could do about it because it wasn’t just the media that were hungry for more, they had a vast public appetite to satisfy. On the 7th August, 2007 Oliveira published a story in the Lisbon daily Diario de Noticas, based on a leak from the police, that said that the PJ had concluded that Maddie was dead and that the McCanns were now suspects, that they had been so since July and that the police in Portugal and Britain were watching them closely as their suspicions deepened.
In early September Noticas published a story, written by their crime reporter Jose Manuel Ribeiro, about Kate McCann’s diary, which the police had seized and which they apparently believed was an important piece of evidence. The story also appeared on Portuguese television and claimed that in it Kate wrote of her difficulty in handling Maddie’s “hyperactivity” and complained about Gerry’s lack of help. The British investigative journalist, David Rose, who has for many years reported on miscarriages of justice, was in Portugal covering the case for the British newspaper The Daily Mail.
He notes how the story “was reported from Berlin to Baltimore” and writes of how he bumped into Ribeiro outside the apartment where Maddie disappeared: “ I congratulated him on his scoop, but he shook his head, disconsolate. Already, he complained, it was turning to dust. Ribeiro said he had been given the story by an impeccable source, but already officials in Lisbon were denying it, and the source himself could no longer assure him it was true. ‘Why is bad information getting out to the public?’ he asked. ‘Because we are being given it.’” As Rose notes sarcastically, the denial of the significance of the diary never quite made it to what he calls “the foreigners,” of which the most significant contingent were the British media (Rose, 2007).
In August a specialist forensic team from the UK was sent out to Portugal to help the investigation. What they were said to be finding led the PJ to summon Kate McCann for an interview of 6th September, where she was interviewed for eleven hours. Well after midnight her Portuguese lawyer arrived at the apartment they had moved to with an offer from the PJ: if she pleaded guilty to manslaughter she would only have to spend two years in prison. She refused. On the 7th September she and Gerry were interviewed again by the PJ after which they were both declared “arguidos,” suspects.
They were allowed to leave Portugal on the 9th September, and anyone who turned on the evening news that night would see them being driven to the airport followed by a posse of cars packed with journalists. As is now widely known the story exploded. In Britain The Express group of newspapers alone would run well over a hundred front page stories, effectively accusing the McCanns of being involved.
This comes as no particular surprise since as they were returning to Britain scores of stories began to run about the forensic “evidence” that had been found: “substantial quantities” of Maddie’s hair in the Renault car rented by the McCanns on their return to Portugal twenty-five days after the disappearance; “bodily fluids” from Maddie’s decomposing body had been found under the upholstery of the car; cadaver dogs had picked up “the scent of death” – a popular phrase that; that there was evidence that her body had been kept in a fridge, and then moved in the car to be buried in a shallow, hidden grave somewhere in the Spanish countryside, a lonely resting place for little Maddie, and all of it given particular force because, it was said, this evidence had been discovered not by the Portuguese but by “our” team, British forensic experts.

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 3 No. 15; August 2013
It immediately got worse when, for example, on 10th September, Sky News correspondent Martin Brunt said that analysis of materials gathered from the McCann’s rental car by Britain’s Forensic Science Service, including it was claimed blood, hair and other fibers, had produced findings which were “significant.” Brunt reported: “According to police it shows the presence of Madeleine’s body in the boot of the family hire car five weeks after she had disappeared...” a claim that was almost immediately denied by the national director of the PJ, Alipio Ribeiro, who said that the tests had not been conclusive.
David Mills, who was producing a documentary for the BBC current affairs programme, Panorama, with his associate producer, Michael Chrisman, discovered that at more or less the same time a Portuguese detective told the journalist Ned Temko that the DNA evidence was not what it seemed, that whatever limited DNA existed was degraded and evidentially useless, and that there was no blood in the car as had been reported. Perhaps most devastatingly to the “evidence” being played out in the media – one headline on Sunday September 28th read, “Maddie Buried in Spain” – Mills and Chrisman point out that travelling with the McCanns in September in their hire car was a close friend and filmmaker, Jon Corner, who noted that the boot of the car “ was full of camera equipment, it was full of posters...” (BBC, 2007).
One might surmise that had there been a child’s body in there, Corner might have noticed. There was one other slight problem with the story that Maddie’s body had been in the wheel well in the boot of the car. Doug Longhini, an experienced producer/investigator for the CBS programme, 48 Hours, working with a Portuguese journalist, rented the same model as that rented by the McCanns, and discovered an interesting fact, it doesn’t have a wheel well: “It was a seven passenger vehicle and two pop-up seats are in the rear where a spare tire would otherwise have been in a five passenger version...” (Longhini, 2011).
The case against the McCanns fell apart as it became clear that the crime scene had been hopelessly compromised ( when a Portuguese forensics team turned up three days after the disappearance they refused to even try and process it ), forensic evidence pointed nowhere, the treatment of the “evidence” in the media was scientifically illiterate. There was, in short, no case. The inflection of the media coverage may have been crude and obviously slanted but, as with the Ramsey case, it led to one overwhelming conclusion in the public mind: a Sunday Times poll, published on 16 September 2007, found that 80% of the British public believed that the parents of Maddie McCann could have been involved in her disappearance and demise; a web site set up by Gerry McCann’s sister, Philomena, received 250 million visits and ten thousand abusive emails, and 20,000 people signed an on-line petition asking Leicestershire social services to investigate the couple for child neglect.
The final police report on the case was delivered to Jose Pinto Monteiro, the Portuguese Attorney General, on 1st July 2008, and on 21st July he announced that the case would be closed because of a lack of evidence that any crime had been committed by the McCanns or anyone else who had been investigated. On the same day the arguido status of the McCanns was lifted. The fact is, though, that the case really wasn’t over because of lingering realities: the life of the McCanns had been destroyed by the actions of the crude police investigation, the poverty of the journalism about the case, the manipulation of that journalism by law enforcement and the most brutal fact of all, Maddie was still missing.
3. Conclusions
There are a number of ways of thinking about the media and these two cases. The most immediate and obvious, and therefore telling, point is that they were both huge stories, particularly, though far from exclusively, for the tabloids, about two strikingly similar young girls, from two very comfortably off families .
Almost from the first day there was, in both cases, a close relationship between the police and the media, with the former supplying the latter with “evidence” which then was presented as fact. This was because in both cases, the police immediately believed that the parents were involved and that, therefore, the means, lying, justified the end, getting an indictment and a conviction. Both also demonstrated what can only be described as an extraordinary amount of lazy journalism. David Rose describes how for most foreign journalists covering the McCann story, every day would start at Hugo Beaty’s bar “shortly after it opens at 9am, with an informal briefing to the foreign press by a locally resident British woman who normally makes a meager living acting as an occasional interpreter – for the Policia Judiciaria.

Every morning the woman...goes through the Portuguese tabloids and translates their ever-more febrile articles. Every afternoon the foreigners...recycle the tales for consumers abroad...” (Rose, 2007). In testimony to the UK Parliament’s select committee on Culture, Media and Sport, that was investigating the question of press standards and that took sharp aim at the McCann case, Clarence Mitchell, who had been hired for the rather desperate job of helping the McCanns deal with the press, said: “They (British journalists) would get the Portuguese press each morning translated for them...Then no matter what rubbish, frankly, was appearing in the Portuguese press from whatever source ( they’d file copy in the British press)...there was no effort to pursue any investigative journalism as we might recognize it...” (Mitchell, 2010).
The dependency culture of using “sources” revealed, yet again, the relationship that now exists between two core institutions, the media and the judicial system. In fact, increasingly these two elemental parts of society seem to be engaged in a dance macabre, where the law has become part of the entertainment industry, and where that industry is consistently fed and led by leaks from law enforcement. The media and law enforcement can perhaps be said to have become business associates. There are obvious implications here for the whole integrity of the judicial process, and a clear sense that in such cases as Ramsey and McCann the long standing debate about free press versus fair trial is, to all intents and purposes, over. It has become quite clear, at least in the United States, that in the collision between the 1st amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees among other things a free press and the 6th which was intended to ensure that the accused had a presumption of innocence, the 1st now consistently trumps the 6th.
In the UK things are somewhat different, and growing so by the day, partly because of cases such as the media coverage of the McCanns, but also because of the “hacking” scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s British papers. There is, in fact, an ongoing and profound debate as to how to regulate, and where necessary punish, newspapers without impinging on press freedom. The select committee on Culture, Media and Sport which investigated press standards, in its final report wrote: “Undue pressure on journalists...must tend to increase the risk of distortion, inaccuracy and unfairness in reporting. Of course, it is impossible to say for certain that untrue articles were written in the McCann case as a result of pressure from editors and news desks.
It is, however, clear that the press acted as a pack, ceaselessly hunting out fresh angles where new information was scarce...no consideration was given to how reporting might prejudice any future trial. It is our belief that competitive and commercial factors contributed to abysmal standards in the gathering and publishing of news about the McCann case. That public demand for such news was exceptionally high is no excuse for such a lowering of standards...While the lack of official information clearly made reporting more difficult, we do not accept that it provided an excuse or justification for inaccurate, defamatory reporting. Further, when newspapers are obliged to rely on anonymous sources and second-hand information, they owe it to their readers clearly to distinguish speculation from fact...” (UK Parliament, CCMS, 2010).
What was also revealed in these two cases, as shown by the polling data, was the sheer ease with which public opinion can be fashioned even if there is an equally clear sense that the public are complicit in that process, as if driven by some psychological need to presume guilt absent any meaningful evidence, what the poet W.D. Snodgrass described as “the vaguely, furiously driven.” What becomes clear is that there is conceptually no difference between the ability of law enforcement to manipulate public opinion about the allegedly murderous acts of venal parents, and the ability of government to manipulate public opinion, by manipulating the media, into seeking revenge against a murderous dictator in a far off land who was “behind” 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction. The scale is different, the process of manipulation is not (Rich, 2006; PIPA, 2003; PIPA, 2004).
At the very least the data on public opinion speaks powerfully to the long standing argument by scholars about the role of the media in constructing public “understandings” about the world around them ( Lipmann, 1920; Mills, 1959). This also suggests, yet again, whole populations that are, to use terms identified by Hadley Cantril and his colleagues decades ago, highly “suggestible” and lacking in “critical ability” (Cantril, H., et al, 1940). It is precisely because the public can be so readily misled or confused that it is of the utmost importance that journalism and journalists operate at the highest levels of accuracy, professionalism and responsibility. That these qualities were so astonishingly absent in the coverage of these two cases is as unfortunate as it is revealing.

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 3 No. 15; August 2013
Finally, there remains the vexing issue implied at the beginning of this piece, that the widespread interest in these cases, which the media were so willing to feed, suggests that something is being expressed from within, and about, the society. To address the social origins of that interest will take a whole different essay. Briefly, however, one might mention one commentary that is perhaps getting close to an answer. The writer Mick Hume said of the McCann case, though his argument readily resonates with the Ramsey case, “ at the risk of being accused of callousness, what is this public outpouring about?” Within a few lines he answered his own question:
“The McCann case has been turned into the latest public focus through which people in a fragmented Britain feel able to come together in a collective display of emotion, to show that we share one another’s pain and are on the side of good....It is about a public display of belonging, of feeling part of an emotional collective at a time when there seems little in society or its values to hold people together...The campaign for ‘Our Maddie’ may indeed be well intentioned; but it has come to look like an increasingly morbid symptom of a society that is missing something other than a little girl... Referencing the fact that people took to wearing basically utterly useless wristbands with the words “Look for Madeleine,” he adds that for many wearers “the real message is more like ‘Look at Me’” (Hume, 2007).
This is rather good social theory since what he is pointing to is a public deeply alienated, anomic, isolated, lonely and that Maddie, and JonBenet, were not just useful commodities for the media to exploit but, through the act of righteous mourning and fevered condemnation of the “guilty” parties, a kind of sedative to deal with what Alan Bennett calls “our own particular emptiness.” (Bennett, 2003)
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