Hello and welcome to this mini-column, in which I’ll cast a critical and inept eye over recent newspaper front pages because I am poor and can’t afford to actually buy newspapers. It’s also possibly the only column in gair rhydd history inspired by Catatonia.
The honour of being the first subject of this column is diplomatically shared between just about all of the tabloids for their August 5th editions. You see that was the day that the police files on the case of popular dead three-year-old Madeleine McCann were released, so it became a battle to see who could smear the biggest picture of her empty bed across their front page.
It was all very tasteless, done solely to lure in those people who invest questionable amounts of emotion into other people’s lives, but The Sun deserves a special mention for somehow managing to heighten the uncomfortable intrusion into what should be a very private grieving process with its sub-heading’s mawkish and unnecessary focus on the ‘cuddle cat toy’.
This sort of voyeurism is a nasty, cynical tactic to increase sales, but sadly one that seems to work. Still, it’s not quite as bad as The Mirror declaring in April that they knew who had Shannon Matthews because of what some psychic had said. That sort of false hope – the headline was simply ‘I know who’s got Shannon’ – must’ve been horrendous for the family. Er, the ones who hadn’t hidden her, at least. Although I bet the ones who had were at least a little nervous.
Anyway, the story on August 5th wasn’t ‘Police release files on Madeleine McCann’s disappearance’. It was ‘LOOK! LOOK! WE HAVE A NEW PICTURE TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO THE PEOPLE’S MADDIE!’ I don’t know if it says worse things about the tabloids or their readers that this was printed and bought, but it is certainly a bit miserable either way.
You can argue that celebrities like Amy Winehouse or Gary Glitter have at least some part in the ridiculous media coverage they receive. But in recent years there’s been an increase in the media’s obsession with non-celebrities: in the last year alone we’ve had John Darwin, the McCanns and Shannon Matthews become the target of incredible numbers of often vicious reports.
These people, whatever they’ve done, have wandered into the public eye by mistake, and they deserve some privacy. Leave them alone, eh?
