Cathcart on Maddy

With the coverage of the Maddy case after a lull for a few weeks returning to the top of the agenda for a few of the papers,the article by Brian Cathcart in this weeks New Statesman is well worth a read.

As he says

A month ago the only story about Madeleine McCann was that her home village of Rothley in Leicestershire had decided to remove the rain-drenched yellow ribbons that adorned the local war memorial

But now

the intervening weeks have given us a second McCann frenzy rivalling the first, but which, for a great deal of the time, seemed to be founded on very little. "Important" and "credible" new witnesses have surfaced; there have been "dramatic new developments

Although he says that the family have contributed to the recent publicity

You have to wonder about the judgement of editors, such as those at the Express and the Mirror, who have been persistently putting these stories on the front page only to see them turn into squibs. Or do they calculate that if they keep on banging away in this fashion, then one day a story will come good and they will be able to claim they got it right?