Blacksmith Bureau: The show goes on–part three

http://blacksmithbureau.blogspot.co.uk/

Let’s step back and consider what all this means for our little shared obsession, the MM Affair. For five years people have been fascinated by the question referred to in the previous piece – on whose behalf has the power of the news machine been used in the case? Which gate was the flock being headed to and why? Certainly many intelligent Portuguese believe that somehow political forces were behind the protection of the couple and that the strange behaviour of the media reflects pressure on it from above. Others have searched for hidden figures who might somehow have been compromised by events in Praia da Luz and have had the clout to keep certain matters silent or disguised in the media.

There is, in fact, a huge list of possible hidden-handers and plenty of evidence that could be interpreted as granting baffling special privilege for the couple — such as, to take one small example, the extraordinary obsequiousness of Lord Justice Leveson to the pair when they gave evidence coupled with his repeated ostentatious dismissals of the "tittle-tattle" evidence against them. Why? Why not just stay courteous, objective and silent as he did with so many others? Such is the type of fuel that supports the fire.

But if Queen Rebekah “bullied” the prime minister into a review how can that possibly be squared with the supposed role of politicians and secret services controlling the UK media, as advanced, despite our efforts to convince him otherwise, by Goncalo Amaral? And if Cameron was pushed into requesting it then how can he have been planning a “whitewash”?

The question of protection of the McCanns is not only a hobby-horse for conspiracy freaks but, because of the Portuguese dimension, a possible determinant of the speed, if not the success, of any joint re-investigation. To the Portuguese, who only emerged from a relatively benign but still highly sinister dictatorship in 1974, and to whom corrupt government misbehaviour is still a living presence, these are serious concerns and the belief that the UK is acting in the same shadowy way as some of their own politicians can produce resistance, as the uproar which accompanied the squelch of Redwood’s foot being planted in his mouth demonstrates.

So it’s in everyone’s interest to try and get a handle on how the media power which Leveson has been illuminating really was used. And here the Bureau,which has always argued against the existence of hidden hands without being able to answer definitively the questions raised by those like Goncalo, has also got something to learn from Leveson and the decreasingly fragrant M/S Brooks.

We had leaned towards the view that most UK editors had taken a cold-blooded and totally cynical decision to ignore the PJ reservations about the McCanns, which existed almost from the start, and work up the abduction angle because it played better and would last longer. In the light of Leveson the idea seems less convincing.

Certainly the Mail is the most cynical newspaper the UK has ever produced but their position on the case seemed to reflect rather than lead those of its readers.Other editors are indeed cynical but many of them seem to have become more sentimentally obsessed with the case than their readership. Tough guy Colin Mylor seemed besotted by the pair and their sufferings; other editors seemed to be taking their cue from the increasingly powerful women's section editors with their innate sympathy for someone in Kate McCann's position.

The then editor of the Express came over better than most of the others but he was the one who had the least time for the abduction theory – not a point he laboured in front of the inquiry. More and more the editors seem to have been as rapt and compelled by the case as the rest of us, with the main mystery being why such apparently hard-bitten people with plenty of past reporting experience of crime and tragedy should have been so bedazzled by the McCanns and so unable to see them in the round.

But should we be surprised? How hard-bitten are modern editors and journalists? It is now decades since the UK press went for the primacy of opinion over reportage as a response to television, and the recruiting profile has probably changed with it. It was an Express witness who told the tribunal flatly that investigative journalists simply didn't exist in Britain anymore, leading to the possible inference that the real cynics are now in the PR business – and observation clearly confirms that – while instinctive newshounds are working for the news agencies who provide the papers with the facts to spin. That would leave most of the UK press as a wing of the reality showbiz industry. Amazingly it seems that many ordinary internet bloggers – not the nutters, not the conspiritorialists – are less credulous than modern journalists and editors.

So it's beginning to appear that the stunningly banal answer to the question on whose behalf have the media been operating is nobody except the McCanns themselves. Which is hard to accept in a sort of Shakespeare-was-too-limited-to-have written-such plays-it-must-have-been-a-lord-or-someone way. But that doesn't make it untrue. It really does look like the press fell for the couple and plugged them in to the celebrity/sensationalism machine only to lose control of the monster they had helped create. And the McCanns now have more experience of working the media, the lawyers and the politicians – courtesy of the wealth that the same media raised for them – than some editors.

Meanwhile, in the Portuguese libel courts, in Oporto and London the slow pursuit of the truth of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann continues. Nicely set, isn’t it? Whatever Leveson decides, the battle between a crumbling and infiltrated overground press and the chaos of voices on the internet is coming, ever-so-slowly, to a head on the unlikely ground of the McCann affair. Who'd have thought it!

Who did the better job of getting at the facts, rather than the frills? One answer is that, despite the claims of the primacy of the overground by Fears Keirs and his like, the whole database – case papers, McCann blogs, interviews, the lot – is on the net, put there by unpaid volunteers, not in the press archives. That really does tell us something.

Sheepgate may never really be resolved. But when the interrupted investigation is finally completed, as it will be, we’ll know whether that overground industry – so many voices, so much money, so much power – carried out its primary duty of reading things right on its readers' behalf and giving them the facts before turning the disappearance of Madeleine McCann into the Greatest Show on Earth. Or whether we will shout at them, you got it wrong, you were all conned.

More crap. Hell will freeze over before smiffy knows anything about anything, but the forkers lap his nonsense up.

Christ, he's almost as bad as Bennett. Don't you feel yourself nodding off halfway through. And he never actually says anything. Or did I miss it?

OK, I will own up. I only read the first paragraph or so. I never read smiffy's boreathons.

I realised long ago he's got nothing new to say, he's just another stuck record, longing for his glory days in 2007/8 when he was preening himself as an interlectool forker with Sauces.