A 'Whoosher's' Tale

When speaking of myth, what better place to start than the press and media, commanders in chief of falsity and salacious gossip.

Putting aside the blatantly obvious for the moment, we will move onto the public's reaction to what they read and hear across mainstream press and media - or more to the point, their misinterpretation of what's propagated across social media. Is the general reaction nothing but a lust for juicy steak or is there some other more nefarious reason for the apparent lack of understanding.

Doesn't anyone care about truth anymore?

Let battle commence with the words 'whooshed' and 'litigious' - more than enough to raise some hackles of the more discerning.

I was recently reading a former police officer's blog that focuses on the Madeleine McCann case. A group of members were grappling over the issue of press and media coverage, the consensus of opinion being they have been silenced by the litigious McCann faction - not allowed to say anything negative about the McCann parents.

Utter nonsense, you only need look back over the years to get an idea of the negative coverage about the McCann's behaviour. Yes they did take legal action against the former Portuguese police officer appointed to coordinate the case, yes they did take legal action against the Express newspaper group for their 'negative' reportage, yes they did take legal action against a member of the public who was becoming somewhat of a nuisance. Is that about it?

Leading on from alleged litigation to 'whooshing', seemingly a word coined by Kate McCann's reference to a billowing curtain - 'whoosh!' she witnessed when entering the children's bedroom on that fateful night of 3rd May 2007 but reverting to the press and media, reports were not 'whooshed' because of the litigious parents McCann, they were archived because no longer of value. Even press reports have a shelf life.

So no litigation other than one or two isolated cases and no 'whooshing' aside from a curtain on a windy night.

Unless an EXCLUSIVE used in correct terminology, the majority of generalised press and media reports emanate from a central source, a press agency. That is the filtered down through the press and media who put their own slant on the information, most likely to appeal to their readership. Words like 'whooshed' to appeal to The Sun reader and 'litigious' to appeal to The Times reader.

It's not difficult to check the facts, just takes a little time and effort. Preferable to spreading falsehoods isn't it?

To this day the parents McCann receive negative coverage through the press and media, when they are not concentrating on other irrelevancies totally unrelated to Madeleine McCann's disappearance.