The McCann's Reality Soap Opera

In May 2007, Madeleine McCann was reported missing by her parents during their holiday in a Portuguese resort. Within days her disappearance had gone from being a tragic missing person's case into an international media extravaganza. The story has continued to dominate the news agenda for the last six months, regularly making front page news all over the world and filling tens of thousands of column-inches in the process.

What has been remarkable about the coverage is that it has grown in inverse proportion to the amount of reliable information available. One of the very few reported “facts” about the case that appears reliable is that the Portuguese police are legally forbidden from communicating information about the investigation to the public. As a consequence of this fact, the media has had virtually no access to reliable information and has instead reverted to spreading tendentious and irresponsible rumours, pumping out moralising gossip based on the presumed personalities of the protagonists, and providing space to a litany of cranks and “experts” of such dubious quality that they are happy to arrive at sweeping and definitive conclusions based on speculative inferences derived from random collections of hearsay.

It hasn't just been the tabloids which have fuelled the McCann phenomenon. The story has made the front page of the Irish Times on four occasions , including one story about a ‘lead' in the case which seems to have been a hoax (at least nobody's mentioned it since).

The Observer, for its part, was responsible for of one of the worst examples of reporting total nonsense as fact. On 7 October, they published a story recounting how “forensic DNA tests reveal traces of Madeleine's body on resort beach”. Subsequently they were embarrassed into publishing a partial correction when the Guardian's Bad Science columnist, Ben Goldacre, pointed out that the “forensic analysis” actually consisted of an eccentric South-African ex-cop putting a strand of Madeleine's hair into a magic box. Still, the only thing that marked the Observer out from the rest of the media pack was the confession that some of the nonsense they had printed was misleading.

Gossipy commentary on the moral stature of the McCann parents wasn't confined to the tabloids either. In the immediate aftermath of the awarding of the Man Booker prize to Anne Enright, her analysis of the McCann's behaviour was reprinted in full in the following week's Sunday Tribune, rather than an excerpt from the prize-winning work. Enright's essay, which described the storm of gossip and speculation around the case, underlined just how successful the McCann's were in their attempts to mobilise the media to highlight their cause.

The intensity of the media frenzy can partly be explained by the McCann's decision to run a professional media campaign, managed by a number of senior PR figures and involving the active recruitment of celebrity support, in order to keep the case in the headlines. However, the media attention is looking increasingly less helpful for the McCanns. In effect they have become celebrities, creatures whose role is to provide raw material for public gossip. While gossip is often looked down upon, studies show that it forms a large part of all human conversation and may perform a necessary role in social education and community cohesion, helping people to learn the subtle moral codes which bind social groups together.

Eminent psychologists have argued that language itself may have evolved in order to facilitate gossip. In today's world, human social networks have grown so large and disparate that people often lack enough knowledge of the acquaintances and background of those they come into contact with. Celebrities provide the common ground around which gossiping can take place.

Thus, there's not much point in condemning newspapers for carrying celebrity gossip. All the evidence suggests that a large number of people are interested in reading it and there's a fairly plausible argument which suggests that it fulfils a socially necessary role. However, good quality gossip requires scandal, crisis and complex moral dilemmas. Gossip is also, by its nature, moralising and speculative. In the commercial world of newspaper publishing, this means that journalists can choose a suitably entertaining narrative for any given celebrity, painting them now as hero, now as villain, and they can always find enough material to portray the protagonists as their chosen character. For example, the Daily Express appeared to turn against the McCanns after they were declared suspects by the Portuguese police. This was signalled by, among other things, a photo of a less than sober Kate McCann at a college party, and some mildly scandalous tales of her wild ways in university, in a tone that suggested that there was something sinister and unusual about students binge-drinking. The media has taken the public through a litany of speculative theories, with the McCanns cast alternately as heroes and villains and all of this has happened without any reliable information intervening. While this reality soap-opera may be entertaining to the public, it can't be very helpful or pleasant for the McCanns.