Across the pond

Richard Desmond, the owner of the four Express newspapers paid a heavy price yesterday for the coverage of McCann child’s disappearance. According to the Daily Mail that price was £550,000. Peanuts perhaps compared with the £24 million Heather Mills has just squeezed from Paul McCartney, following the break-up of their unhappy marriage. But a big dent in the coppers of the man who rival newspapers like to call the pornographer. He has found making money from newspapers rather more difficult than cashing in from porn mags.

The news has been duly reported by the Fleet Street finest. Picture at the top is from The Daily Telgraph. The news was broken by The Guardian’s media columnist, Roy Greenslade, who was also touring the radio and television studio last night to let the nation know just how much Express standards have fallen since it was owned by that old Crusader, Lord Beaverbrook.

To be fair to Greenslade is his colunm in The Guardian, he makes the important point was while the Express was the worst offender, particularly with its headlines, all of Fleet Street, broadsheets and tabloids, printed thousand of words, containing many allegations about the McCann’s parenting, most of it from elements in the local police and anyone the journalists could find in the neighbourhood. Most of it was unstantiated gossip.

Much of this was magnified still further by the television and radio coverage. And today’s newspapers, alongside their reports of the shaming of the Express, are also telling us about ‘novel’ written by the Portugues policeman, which suggests the child was killed and dumped in the ocean.

The blanket coverage over many months has left ordinary readers, listeners and viewers, not knowing what to believe. But the essential fact is that no one has found any hard facts to indicate were gulity even of bad parenting, let alone guilty of murdering their child.

The fact that the Portugese police questioned the McCann’s as potential suspects, gave all the newspapers something ‘hard’ to report. What the police say is ‘news’. You can fault the police on their clumsy handling of the press relations, but any poliice force has to treat family members as suspects, because of the overwhelming evidence that murders, rapes, kidnappings, etc, are more often done by members of the family or friends, rather than by strangers.

So also this morning the newspapers are reporting that the British police have now charged a family member with the kidnapping of Shannon Matthews. But not before all the shortcomings of Shannon’s mother and her numerous lovers have been  trumpeted to the world.

Matters like this should not be left to the lawyers, which gives more help to the rich like McCartney and Mills, and the relatively well off, like the McCanns. But leaves poor and dysfunctional families like the Matthews as helpless victims under the media spotlight.

The problem is how to get changes while preserving the freedom of the press. The Press Complaints Commission and its various predessors has proved a toothless tiger. Self regulation by the editors and the proprietors has not worked. Whatever their good intentions, the decision making is mostly dominated by the need to make money, when circulations are falling and the economy is moving into recession.

And there is no doubt that stories like this sell newspapers.

It is not a problem that can be solved quickly. And all media commentoros, including myself, are only too aware of the long history of earlier enquiries, including the several Royal Commissions and the enquiry into the Yorkshire Ripper. But the fact that they have not worked does not mean that there is no satisfactory solution. And any enquiry should include the role of the internet. Where, according to a comment one of my recent blogs, you can get away with calling for the murder of Tony Blair.