Looks like the American press isn’t alone in going nuts over sensational stories that, while newsy, aren’t exactly of great national importance.
Over in the U.K., the media is currently going through their own version of the Natalee Holloway case (the Alabama teen who went missing in May, 2005 in Aruba, and who has yet to be found.) The past few weeks have seen a British press frenzy over the disappearance on May 3 of four year-old Madeline McCann, a British girl vacationing in Portugal with her parents. The wall-to-wall coverage lead the Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins to write on Friday that “the coverage has been absurdly over the top and cannot have served the interests of the family, or the eventual cause of justice.”
Just like any good 21st century scandal, the case has already spawned its shareWeb sites, blogs and even a lengthy Wikipedia entry.
The story is a familiar one to American news consumers, who have endured years of “missing white girl” stories from Chandra Levy to Holloway. “Since the disappearance of Madeleine on May 3,” Jenkins writes, “another 450 young people have gone missing in Britain. While many are teenagers, none has received anything like the attention given to the McCanns.”
Firing on all cylinders, Jenkins sums up this trans-Atlantic fascination with stories like these:
So what made this case so special as to merit the trans-shipment of Fleet Street’s finest and the BBC’s chief news-reader? The answer is that a “big news story” is not a systematic concept. It does not emerge onto the page according to some calculus of merit.
To acquire front page status a story must compete with dozens of similar human interest stories on a particular day…the story should relate the ordinary lives of readers…it must contain tears, suspense and mystery.
Such features are not cynical or strange. A newspaper story strives to attain the quality of a novel, if only because it knows that readers like novels, as television viewers like soap operas. The human imagination is attuned to narratives that have beginnings, middles and ends, preferably ends that carry some moral message. Under this pressure what is extraordinary is not that newspapers sometimes make things up (and get them wrong) but that they make so little up.
The McCann story ticked all these boxes.
We seen these boxes get ticked on this side of the Atlantic, too, and as long as these stories continue to drive ratings and sell tabloids, I don’t expect anything to change any time soon.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.