I think the following article sums up much of the 'reasoning' behind the very unfriendly press treatment to which the McCanns were subject.
In the
days after Madeleine's disappearance
criticism was being made that she was being looked for.
from the article ...
In his Thursday column in the Público newspaper, the former head of Portugal’s bar association, José Miguel Júdice, said the enormous mobilisation was due to the fact that the little girl “is English, white, and the daughter of doctors.”
In the cases of the
31 children who went missing last year in Portugal,
“we didn’t see helicopters or planes chartered by TV stations, or hundreds of police officers and trained dogs,” he wrote.
The only thing I could say in response to that is ...
why the Hell not ??PORTUGAL: Some Missing Children More Equal than OthersBy Mario de Queiroz
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Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, May 18 2007 (IPS) - Never before has the Portuguese idiom “para o inglês ver” (literally: for the English to see), which means putting on a front to impress outsiders and ward off criticism, been so apt as today in Portugal, when the entire country has its attention riveted on the case of a four-year-old British girl who disappeared from a hotel two weeks ago.
The investigation into the May 3 disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a resort in Portugal’s southern Algarve region has come up with few leads and little evidence, despite the unprecedented police effort in a country where kidnappings of local children have gone largely unnoticed.
The saying “para o inglês ver”, remarkably pertinent with respect to this case, emerged in Brazil in 1831, when a law was passed prohibiting the importation of slaves under pressure from the British. However, the law was not enforced, and the slave trade continued at a brisk pace in Brazil and in Portugal’s African colonies, thus giving rise to the idiom that referred to a law approved merely for the sake of appearance.
Madeleine went missing from her hotel room at the Ocean Club resort in the village of Praia da Luz, where she was sleeping along with her two-year-old twin siblings while their parents had dinner at a poolside tapas bar 40 metres away.
Since then, the British ambassador has gotten involved, and the Judicial Police, with the support of other police forces, has launched a search and investigation operation of a scope never before seen in Portugal, with130 senior officers and 800 beat officers reportedly assigned to the case.
In the last two weeks, the quiet former fishing village of Praia da Luz has been overrun by police officers and their dogs, as well as battalions of British and Portuguese journalists who have set up satellite dishes to broadcast around the clock.
The only suspect investigated so far is Robert Murat, a British resident of Praia da Luz. Also questioned, but as a witness, was Russian computer specialist Sergei Malinka, who helped design a web site for Murat.
Murat’s home, near the Ocean Club, was searched by the police, who said they did not arrest him because not enough evidence was found, although tests are still being carried out on objects found in the dwelling.
The police have not been forthcoming with information, and much of the media coverage has been speculation.
The case has triggered a media feeding frenzy and has snowballed into an international cause, in which ordinary citizens, analysts, psychologists, doctors and criminologists have all offered their opinions and advice on radio and television programmes and web logs (blogs).
Some observers point out that Madeleine comes from a well-heeled British family (both of her parents are doctors), unlike so many Portuguese or immigrant children whose disappearance has drawn scant attention from the press.
Brazilian-Portuguese activist Ana Filgueiras told IPS that “the deployment of resources to find the missing girl is laudable, but it is regrettable that the same does not happen in the case of people who are less well-off. In Portugal we have never before seen a mobilisation of this magnitude.”
Filgueiras founded the non-governmental Brazilian Centre for the Defence of Children’s Rights (CBDDCA) in the 1970s, which drew attention to the killings of street children by military police in Rio de Janeiro.
“Across the globe, but especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the kidnapping of children is almost routine, but the phenomenon receives little coverage from media that are more interested in reporting each and every detail of the disappearance of a British girl, even though the case is insignificant in statistical terms,” said Filgueiras.
According to UNICEF (the U.N. children’s fund), 1.2 million children are trafficked every year around the world.
In Portugal, SOS Criança Desaparecida (SOS Missing Children) of the Instituto de Apoio Crianza opened 31 new cases last year of missing children, involving 19 girls and 12 boys.
Filgueiras said that when Portuguese children go missing, “no TV station airs photos of the victims,” but in Madeleine’s case “we are watching a soap opera conceived of to boost ratings and readership to a maximum, by playing on people’s feelings.”
“If Madeleine were the daughter of parents from Africa, Eastern Europe or even Portugal, would the media have seized on it like this? Would there be so much news, and such an outpouring of concern?” asks someone writing at
http://mrsleeves.blogspot.com, a Portuguese language blog.
Another blog,
http://insolitos-da-gravata.blogspot.com/, notes that in the case of Joanna, a Portuguese girl who disappeared a year ago, “it took the police several days to start searching, while in this case it took just 30 minutes, and I can’t avoid thinking, selfishly, that it was only because she was from a well-off English family, since any of us would have had to wait for 48 hours after the disappearance, as established by law.”
The Judicial Police launched the investigation six hours after Kate McCann, Madeleine’s mother, reported that her daughter was missing. “Record time in Portugal,” said Carlos Anjos, president of the association of criminal investigators, who added, however, that six hours was enough time for the kidnappers to have sped across the border with Spain, just 150 kilometres away.
In his Thursday column in the Público newspaper, the former head of Portugal’s bar association, José Miguel Júdice, said the enormous mobilisation was due to the fact that the little girl “is English, white, and the daughter of doctors.”
In the cases of the 31 children who went missing last year in Portugal, “we didn’t see helicopters or planes chartered by TV stations, or hundreds of police officers and trained dogs,” he wrote.
The British and Portuguese media have not reacted this way on other occasions, “and they couldn’t care less about reporting on the immense tragedy in (the Sudanese region of) Darfur, because doing so is infinitely more dangerous and brings less audience and readership than describing, live and direct, every single detail of the family drama” in Praia da Luz, Júdice maintained.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/05/portugal-some-missing-children-more-equal-than-others/ 
