To admit that you have not heard mention of the name Madeline McCann is to confess that you haven't picked up a newspaper or watched televised news broadcasting in the past year. Abducted in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on May 3, 2007, the angelic three-year old -- the British version of JonBenet Ramsey -- has become a media obsession in Europe and elsewhere. While her parents were dining with friends a short distance away, "Maddy" was taken from the family's holiday apartment, where she lay sleeping with her two younger siblings. Since Madeline's disappearance, the media coverage of the story has led anyone and everyone who has remotely followed it on a wild goose chase. Madeline's story is one to be remembered, as it reminds us that the media lens is opaque and not transparent, especially when what is true will be subordinated to what is newsworthy.
At first, news stations rallied behind the McCanns, passionately condemning the tragedy. British celebrities J.K. Rowling and David Beckham earnestly solicited the help and financial support of the public, while the McCann parents toured Europe with pictures of their daughter -- identifiable by the distinct birthmark in the corner of her right eye. Meanwhile, the Find Madeline Fund, designed to help parents Gerry and Kate McCann pay their legal fees and mortgage bills, collected an impressive $2.1 million from the hands of a wealthy, but compassionate public, which was saddened by what it had read and seen in the news.
Like a tacky soap opera, however, the heart-wrenching Madeline mystery assumed an unforeseeable and horrific twist upon the naming of Mr. and Mrs. McCann as "arguidos" -- Portugese for suspects -- in the investigation. Speculation on the exact nature of the evidence against the parents ran wild. Did Kate accidentally kill her own daughter? Were there traces of Maddy's blood inside the McCann's rental car? Had specialist doctors Gerry and Kate McCann used tranquilizers to sedate their energetic little Maddy? The funds that had poured abundantly into the bank accounts of the mourning McCann parents were frozen in a heartbeat.
Gerry and Kate McCann, like so many other hot-topic individuals in the news, had become puppets in the real-life melodrama that had been so marvelously enacted by the large media networks. In the search for a missing girl that has arguably received nearly as much media attention as such major world events as September 11 and the subway attacks in London in July of 2005, readers discovered an exciting adventure story, a real page-turner whose subtle plot twists kept them captivated and enthralled.
The remarkable capacity of reputable media networks to transform stories such as the McCanns' into fuddled accounts with interesting plot lines and exciting twists is frightening given that the vast majority of us equate news reporting with the truth. For today's political protagonists, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the issue of media representation could not be more important. Considering the many rumors and contradictory fragments of personal information insinuated about these two figures, however, it is exceedingly difficult even to attempt to decipher any sense of truth about them both as politicians and as individuals. Writer Joshua Holland of AlterNet.org criticizes the role of media in representing the politics of today: "The idea that perception is far more important than reality has become the principle of our broadcast politics, debasing our political discourse to a game of controlling the spin."
Despite such alluring slogans as "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report: You Decide," the media will never stop spinning. In a business in which the same few networks compete for the edgiest stories, details of real-life occurrences will be fabricated and controversies exaggerated. And in a world in which intricate stories such as that of Maddy McCann are represented in brief through sound bites and bold-print captions, no whole story will ever be revealed. In reconciling this inevitability with our need to constantly have up-to-the-minute news coverage, we should teach ourselves not to believe everything we read, see and hear.
