The press coverage received by the already traumatised family and their friends was nothing short of diabolical and they got off very lightly for it as demonstrated by Professor Cathcart elsewhere in the New Statesman article.
Everything they wrote was based on falsehoods linked to leaks from the investigation which were printed in the Portuguese press and lazily taken up by journalists incapable of doing their jobs and printed by editors conscious only of competition and their sales.
That the disgraceful articles continue to exercise their malign influence even today can be witnessed by those who appear to believe them to this day and write about them still on forums such as and even this.
THE NEW STATESMANThe Real McCann ScandalBrian Cathcart details how the British press set out to systematically destroy the parents of Madeleine McCann
BY BRIAN CATHCART PUBLISHED 23 OCTOBER, 2008 - 10:17
You may have missed it: at the High Court in London on 15 October, Express Newspapers agreed to pay £375,000 in libel damages to the so-called "Tapas Seven", the friends of Kate and Gerry McCann who were with the couple in Portugal when Madeleine McCann disappeared.
This development did not receive much coverage. There were three sentences in the Sun on page 21, for example, and just a little more in the Daily Mirror on page 20. In the Daily Express itself you might easily have failed to spot the apology that was part of the settlement, as the two paragraphs in the top corner of page five were a little lost beside the bold headline blaring out across the rest of the spread: "Let the jobless lag lofts, says Brown". The Tapas Seven victory, it seems, was treated as a minor footnote to a burned-out story; few people were likely to be interested.
Well, they ought to be interested, because the McCann case was the greatest scandal in our news media in at least a decade - an outrage far worse than the Andrew Gilligan "sexed-up dossier" affair of 2003 - and those responsible are now slinking away almost unpunished. They are escaping, moreover, by the most shameful of means. The editors and proprietors of the papers responsible for the great balloon of speculative nonsense that was the McCann story had the power to kill off discussion of what went wrong in the press, and they used it. When their balloon burst, they simply began pretending it had never existed.
**snip
Error on this scale, involving hundreds of “completely untrue” news reports, published on front pages month after month in the teeth of desperate denials, can only be systemic
**snip
But look at what we now know about the stories published in this hysterical atmosphere, starting with ones about the Tapas Seven. In as many as 20 articles published over six months, the Sunday and Daily Express and the Daily Star suggested that this group covered up the truth about the girl's disappearance and misled the police who were invest igating the case. They also suggested that one member of the group was officially suspected of being in volved in abducting Madeleine.
As the official apology put it: "We now accept that these suggestions should never have been made and were completely untrue."
**snip
Error on this scale, involving hundreds of "completely untrue" news reports, published on front pages month after month in the teeth of desperate denials, can only be systemic. Judging by what appeared in print, it involved a reckless neglect of ethical standards, a persistent failure to apply even the most basic journalistic rigour, and plenty of plain cruelty.
http://www.newstatesman.com/law-and-reform/2008/10/madeleine-mccann-daily-britishIn keeping Madeleine McCann's name in the public eye the press coverage has been an essential tool ... but none can deny that her parents have paid the price for it as demonstrated by their vilification for nearly eight years which continues apace .
