The rest of the media has joined in an extended reporting-as-gloating session over the out-of-court settlement that Express Newspapers agreed with Kate and Gerry McCann today. It has been top of the running order on news bulletins all day, with pundits queuing up to decry the coverage of Richard Desmond’s papers.
Nobody does schadenfraude better than [...]

Sunday Mirror columnist Carole Malone talking about Shannon Matthews, on the One Show tonight:
The media reflects the public mood, and the public just haven’t taken to Shannon’s family as they did to Kate and Gerry McCann.
Yes, it’s the fault of the public - the scum who read newspapers rather than the nice people who write [...]

I was thinking the other day about precisely the issue Roy Greenslade discusses on his blog today. Namely, why is it that three weeks after the disappearance of Shannon Matthews, the case doesn’t have nearly the same profile as Madeleine McCann’s did?
Greenslade speculates that the “unsympathetic domestic profile” of Shannon’s mum, Karen, in contrast with the educated, middle class [...]

Happy New Year to all 14 of my unique visitors! The beginning of 2008 is a chance to reflect on the fact that in the six months that I’ve been writing this blog, virtually no-one has read it.
Despite my transparent attempts to build traffic by baiting Andrew Gilligan (which did, at least, result in a [...]