Pointing fingers over a missing child.

Britain and Portugal

Haven’t the McCanns suffered enough? asked Lorraine Kelly in the London Sun. Little Madeleine McCann has been missing for more than 100 days. Her parents, Kate and Gerry, have been through months of hell since they returned from dinner in a Portuguese resort to find that the 4-year-old had been abducted from the hotel room. The McCanns have tortured themselves with guilt for having left the girl and her 2-year-old twin siblings “alone in their holiday apartment.” They have spared no effort to search for their daughter, blanketing Europe with ads and pleas, appearing on every TV and radio show that would take them, and blogging relentlessly. Yet last week, “a disgraceful whispering campaign” sprang up in the Portuguese press after Portuguese police announced they had found specks of blood in the room and no longer suspected abduction. Maddy’s parents face completely unfounded, “vile accusations that they could have harmed or even killed her.”

British journalists have been reacting with unprofessional hysteria, said the Lisbon Diario de Noticias in an editorial. “They say we Portuguese journalists have taken sides in the case,” and accuse us of a “conspiracy to smear” the McCanns. That allegation “simply makes no sense.” What we have been doing is reporting conscientiously on the case as it unfolds. When our confidential sources in the Portuguese police tell us things that British journalists haven’t learned, that is merely because we have the local sources while they understandably do not. The Portuguese press has been an impartial observer.

Which is more than we can say for the British, said Francisco Moita Flores in the Lisbon Correio da Manha. Their guidelines are simple: “All the news that indicates possible kidnapping is legitimate. All the news indicating other possibilities is bad” and must be labeled speculation or smear. The truth is, the Portuguese people gave the McCanns their sympathy. “We cried and prayed with them, and we wanted to believe that all their media spin was excusable in light of their grief.” Had it been Portuguese parents who abandoned three preschoolers to go drinking with friends, we would have been merciless. The police probably would have called in Child Welfare. But we made excuses for the McCanns, realizing they were from another culture—the English “are infamous for getting drunk in the Algarves.”

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Plenty of details never made it into the British accounts, said José Carlos Marques, also in the Correio da Manha. Englishmen never heard that the British ambassador put pressure on the Portuguese national police chief to pursue the kidnapping theory first. They never heard that the blood traces found in the McCanns’ resort apartment were the remains of a stain cleaned off with cleaning products from their own bathroom. Do they realize that the McCanns have been protected throughout the inquiry by “powerful friends” such as advisors to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown?

Stephen Pollard

Times