f13.net

Anyone else totally fascinated with this case?  I don't mean the fact that a little girl has gone missing, but the strange attitude of the British media and the active involvement of the British Government in a criminal investigation.

Some DNA evidence apparently places traces of the little girl in the boot of her parents car, a car hired 25 days after she goes missing and the British press are still treating the parents as saints.  Parents who left a 3 year old little girl alone in an apartment with her two younger siblings while they went out to dine with friends regularly.  Parents who were made two of the three official suspects in her disappearance after apparently refusing to answer some 40 questions from the police.

To read unbiased reports you are limited to the Belfast Telegraph (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/columnists/gail-walker/article2974525.ece) or the Times of India (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/The_Global_Indian_Takeover/A_prayer_for_maddy/articleshow/2526678.cms)

I'd list all the weird incidents in this story but there's far too many, youtube has a few up (http://youtube.com/watch?v=EpKZO3c69Ps).

1 - Let's not do this.
2 - Putting it in Serious Business was a mistake, it'll head to politics.
3 - Let's not do this.
4 - You're not correct in anything you say, so..
5 - Let's not do this.

I personally believe there's a reason, despite the amount of Brits on the boards, that this conversation hasn't come up.  Let's not.

There's a big pink elephant standing in the middle of the room and we shouldn't talk about it? 

I have no clue what happened to the little girl but if you compare translations of the Portuguese press (http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53176) to the next days British press (http://www.anorak.co.uk/madeleine-mccann) (that's based on those reports), something very odd is happening.

Wasn't in my Living Room till you put it there, being my point.

Fair enough.  I started the thread because I don't condone what's happening, if nobody else wants to talk about it, I'm not going to push it.

No.

You think I should have made the thread title reflect the contents, so you would have known to avoid it then?

Is there the same fatigue in the UK as there is in the US with MWWS, or Missing White Woman Syndrome, whereby being pretty, white, not poor, and female is basically the only way the media will care if something horrible happens to you?

Lol, that was made of win.

No, I had no idea what the hell the contents were. I don't watch this kind of 'news'. What does it mean to my friends, family or community? Nothing at all. Not news. I don't watch traditional news outlets because they obsess about non-news like this.

It is a slight cut above celebrity 'news', though. I wish OJ, Lindsey, Britney and a whole host of celebutards just start killing and eating paparrazi. Now THAT would be an interesting 'news' story.

I don't understand why this is serious business.

Speaking of which (probably NSFW): Natalee Holloway has a webcam (http://nataleewebcam.ytmnd.com/)

I'm just trying to figure out a story.

I think it's this.

Girl disappeared without a trace.

Sooooooooo...... why is this traveling around the world at record speed?

Probably because the writers of "Without a Trace" are on strike.

By unbiased reports you mean reports that agree with what you think?

No one else agrees with my loony theory, therefore they are all wrong?  Or, possibly, the ones reporting loony theories are, actually, loony and catering to the loony market?

I don't know, or care to know, anything about the story but pointing at one bit of flawed reporting as proof that there is other bits of flawed reporting is, well, flawed.

I guess that there are no unbiased news sources left anymore, everyone slants it to the left and right. We should all just concern ourselves with things that only directly impact our own life that we personally observe.

Scope buddy.  Were talking about a missing child case where ALL THE INFORMATION IS FROM RELEASED REPORTS.

Scope.  It's important.

It's not a big pink elephant.

It's someone else's personal grief with a small horde of tinfoil wearers swarming around.

And it doesn't need a thread.


Much as it sounds mean spirited, it's because shes blond, there were good family pictures available, and the publicity people did a good job in the short period when getting attention so people would look fort her was a good idea.


If you must do this thread...

http://missingkids.co.uk/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearchServlet

oh she's a pretty white girl.

makes sense now.

I concur.

Also, record speed?  This happened in May. 

But let's not do this. 

I'm guessing something went to shit in politics that I don't know about because I'm never there, but I don't see the OMG TEH HORROR over discussing missing children.

Unless one of you bastards took her, then I'd say we have legal troubles.

Eh?  There's a media frenzy on the story that's already affected relations between Portugal and the UK.  The links I gave attempted to address both sides involved and were mostly critical of the media coverage, so um yeah?

There's also a screenwipe segment from Charlie Brooker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO9sNoWSVN8) that's quite good on it all (mind you I might think it's quite good because yes I agree with it).  Given the replies Ironwood was right, so I'm happy if this is denned.

I've come across this attitude of 'leave it alone' from several Brits I know, and I'm not sure why this case isn't considered fair game. 

Yes, it's a terrible tragedy no matter what happened, but so is half the shit we make fun of on this board. The Jon-Benet Ramsey case (I think that's the one, the girl from Colorado) is similar in many ways, and pretty much everyone thought it was the parents until that guy in Thailand confessed to being involved (at which point the Feds lost a laptop with the evidence on it.  Brilliant.).  Even South Park made fun of it, and I chuckled along with most people.  Perhaps the child abduction rates are that much higher in the States and we're more jaded to it, but it seems like a weird standard considering the other shit we talk about.

The media makes way too big a story of missing white kids all the time. But that's been their MO for a while now, take essentially local stories like police chases for knocking over liquor stores, school shootings and abducted kids and attack the story like a vampire, draining it of all its lifeblood and generally shitting over all the participants. Something that bleeds has to fill up a 24-hour newscycle.

The Amber Alert stuff, while a very noble program, doesn't help, because media outlets have to post the Amber Alert stories.

Some things are just extra-sensitive in Britain, for reasons I don't fully comprehend.  The last time I visited London years ago, we were in a pub with some British friends, and a news report came on the TV about soccer programs for kids with Downs Syndrome, complete with hilarious video.  I'm remembering it and laughing as I type this.  It's nothing against the handicapped, and I have all the sympathy and admiration in the world for what they and their families go through, it's just that watching kids with Downs Syndrome play soccer is, indeed, hilarious.  My friend and I (Americans) did our best not to laugh out loud, and let out a snicker at the most, but our British friends were appalled that we could be so callous.  Then again, from my experience, they toss around racial slurs and derogatory racial jokes in Britain much more freely than over here, even if they don't know you that well.  My experience is anecdotal, no Pew studies to rely on, but the impression I get is that it's rather idiosyncratic what the "things you just don't talk about" are in any given country.

Yeah, That's a Funny Story.

Hey, you know what else is funny ?  That scene in Trainspotting where the American gets the fuck kicked out of him in the toilets for the crime of walking into a pub.

It made me piss myself.

Fuck, I suddenly, really dislike you.

Welcome to the club. We are going to have jackets made.

Most murdered children are killed by their parents (someone else look up the statistics I cbf) and despite some evidence that this may have happened in this situation the media is not willing to entertain the notion? Should we be surprised?

No.

Now if the parents was just a parent, and a single father at that, I doubt we'd be seeing the same headlines. We just had a woman here in Australia get let off charges of killing 5 or so of her children. And a father who allegedly drove his kids into a lake and drowned them to get back at his ex-wife.

I think the fact that the English press isn't going near it because it was originally a missing persons story that generated a whole heap of sympathy, that happened in Portugal, to two seemingly nice people, etc, is unsurprising. Right/wrong? I'm not going to bother making this more of a politics thread than it is already.

But it's not surprising. Nor, for me, fascinating.

More than likely you already disliked him, considering how long you've been here.

It still is a missing persons case. 

You can't point the finger at people and call them murderers unless, you know, you've got a body and there's actually been a murder.  As for the question "Did they kill their child - the one that they spent years undergoing IVF to have - and have they covered it up?"  well, that's been asked by the media already.  But as there's no body, no evidence and no information, it seems unlikely that they're going to be able to give an answer.

My sister and her partner are both in the police, both doing kinda specialised but very relevant stuff.  Both say that the Portugese investigation has been like something out of the 1970s, particularly in the apalling crime scene management that went on during the vital first hours and days.

They're also very sceptical of the Portugese accusations about the McCanns, who they say should have been quietly treated as prime suspects from the absolute beginning, which would then have led to them being quickly ruled out if innocent.

The whole story has displayed the wretched nature of most 24-hour human interest and gossip news channels at the moment.  Even the BBC coverage was vile, two-faced, sly and tendentious, and the facts-per-hour level was virtually zero.  Even if Dr Crippen had been found alive and well and living in Nebraska I learn nothing from watching his plane land.

Finally, Arthur, cheers for the Charlie Brooker piece: I've loved his stuff since TVGoHome (http://www.tvgohome.com/) and didn't realise he had so much of his work available on YouTube.

Brooker also does a column for The Guardian.  It is chock full of Win.

I have loved the mans work since 'Animal Cruelty Zoo'  (http://archive.thisisbradford.co.uk/1998/1/30/178187.html) all those years ago.

 :awesome_for_real:


EDIT : Best link I could find.

A lot of the McCann stuff in the press at the moment is a mild backlash about how things went on in the first month or so ("Poor innocent parents having their worst nightmare come true", the poster campaigns, meeting the Pope, and so on) contrasted against revelations about what probably happened (Parents doping up their kids with tranquilizers so that they could go out and have a meal with their friends without having to get a babysitter).