‘Maddie’ and the media in Britain AD (After Diana)

Over the past three weeks, the campaign and media coverage around the missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann has continued to seize the public imagination in a way that politics in Britain never does these days. And it has also apparently done what wars cannot any more, by uniting the nation behind a cause.

Few want to question the response to Madeleine’s disappearance, since we are talking about an innocent little girl. Yet, despite my suggestion that we should shut up about ‘Our Maddie’, there is a need to keep questioning the reasons behind this phenomenon, and what it reveals about the British state of mind.

The campaign for ‘Our Maddie’ may indeed be well-intentioned; but it has come to look like an increasingly morbid symptom of a society that is missing something other than a little girl.

UPDATE: It's those fucking baby-eating Moroccans