'Sun headlines are poetry says first woman Laureate'

On Saturday The Sun ran the front page 'MADDIE AGED 6', with a larger-than life-size artist's impression conjured by 'forensics wizards' in the States. Relating Madeline McCann immediately to her mother, the image purports to show how the girl would appear to Kate McCann on the 'second anniversary of her daughter's disappearance'.

The McCanns have been doing a round of publicity in line with this date (somehow anniversary seems like the wrong word), which we might call also a media event, so widely do the media seem to have invested in the story. Indeed this issue of The Sun is, in part, a report of the McCanns' appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, with which the newspaper is clearly impressed. It uses stills from the TV show, close-ups of Gerry McCann looking angry and 'Maddie's mum Kate', heavily made-up and weeping, alongside the headline 'JUST LIKE MUM'.

Kate McCann and images of Kate McCann are at the centre of the Media's enjoyment of this story, and it's not only to see the woman grieving. Anne Enright has written about how the politics of Mrs McCann's beauty complicates the story of her missing daughter: in one still from Oprah she is shown clutching her husband's thigh, wearing a short skirt.

The headline 'JUST LIKE MUM' refers back to the image on the front and begins to age Madeline, growing her into Kate. The image on the front cover is disturbing, the absent girl now imagined as all-American, perfected in abduction. The look of impatience on her face as she smiles here is sad but determined. The fringe is more real than the rest of the image. The green eyes, purporting as they might to reality, are in this image only terrifying. An image cut-into the corner of the new portrait, of real Madeline aged three, is haloed and also terrifying.

Who is this girl on the cover? The Sun don't seem to know, referring to her in the space of three sentences as being 'on the brink of turning six', as having been snatched 'days before her fourth birthday', and as 'the three year old her mum last saw'. In fact, in the image she might look as old as twelve. Kate (41) is the subject of one of the three sentences and the object of another.

The photo of Madeline McCann is not the only thing on the front page of The Sun, although it takes up a good 80%. Diagonally opposite the little cut-in of real Madeline is a similar size picture of a small child with the caption: 'Baby P ... lad died from abuse'. This is not the news today however, as the headline reveals: 'Stepfather of Baby P raped tot, 2'.

The colloquial variations at work within the language here enact the casual violence required of The Sun's diction; the associations we are asked to make as we assimilate the stories on the page leaves us little doubt as to the populist theme of today's paper (circulation 3m).

The final story on the front page feeds into the theme. Over the caption 'Isolated' is a picture of a blonde girl in a medical mask lying asleep/unconscious in a hospital bed. This is 'N-Dubz girl Tulisa' (20), the lead singer of 'No 1 band N-Dubz'.

What are we to make of all this exactly? Andrew O'Hagan gets straight to a difficult point:

We could ... suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite. ‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ [Margo] Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes underreported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerised by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n13/ohag01_.html