{"id":446,"date":"2007-05-24T15:29:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-24T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=446"},"modified":"2007-05-24T15:29:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-24T21:29:00","slug":"madeleine-mccann-rite-and-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/05\/madeleine-mccann-rite-and-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Madeleine McCann: rite and wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">A<\/span>s the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Madeleine McCann<\/span> story endured, I spoke to reporters who said: \u201cIf she was black, or poor, or\u2026\u201d and gave that slightly embarrassed look that journalists give one another on stories like this, hoping for an acknowledgement.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s not much to inform, educate or entertain about child abduction. And this isn\u2019t just a case study in how to manage the media <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">in extremis<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>So how do we rationalise the attention?<span id=\"fullpost\"> Is there something in the story that somehow we\u2019re missing? Because we are missing something, and that something is opportunity.<\/p>\n<p>The story of Madeleine McCann is an opportunity, not for journalists, but for the public \u2013 or at least a large section of them: to express their solidarity with the McCanns and with one another; to hope, however vainly, with Madeleine\u2019s parents for a miracle; and to affirm the wrongness and evil of harming children.<\/p>\n<p>No one doubts the importance of collective acknowledgement of loss in war on Remembrance Day. The <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">BBC<\/span> doesn\u2019t apologise for its broadcasting of state occasions.<\/p>\n<p>And yet \u2013 here we are, priests of a self-invented church,  unbelieving celebrants of a ritual that is somehow filling the aisles with believers, inviting us too to believe.<\/p>\n<p>Then the rite is over. The church empties. We have ourselves to talk to once again.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the Madeleine McCann story endured, I spoke to reporters who said: \u201cIf she was black, or poor, or\u2026\u201d and gave that slightly embarrassed look that journalists give one another on stories like this, hoping for an acknowledgement. There\u2019s not much to inform, educate or entertain about child abduction. And this isn\u2019t just a case [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,265],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-bbc","tag-journalism-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}