How The Media Works

Mind you, they're only playing things the way football clubs do every day of the year:

At least three papers offered the McCanns big bucks to take a lie-detector test, with the Screws in particular supposedly offering £250k. Eventually, all get turned down. Fair enough you might think, it wouldn't prove anything and people would retain their doubts whether they passed or failed.

But two days later, the Team McCann pops up in the papers offering to do a lie detector test - for the Portugal police. Who, as everyone knows - including, one assumes, the couple - do not use the machines, which are inadmissible evidentially.

Result! A nice innocent-looking hollow gesture that would have played very differently if the public had known they had refused to take a test earlier but which the papers won't report as they all jostle for position for the inevitable eventual megabucks "exclusive" with the McCanns when the affair is over.

So, as the press moves on to the next planted story with which they can fill a few easy pages (the ludicrous tale of the girl in Morrocco) this issue gets forgotten and the McCanns continue to control the agenda. Just as football clubs do with their crappy patsy interviews with players which so often cover up bigger news.

As the journos move on to the next story, it ensures important ones get forgotten. Similarly with football reporters easily distracted by trivia, we still wait for the results of the Harry Redknapp-Betfair investigation, the promised FA probe into the manager who was pissing away hundreds of thousands in bets each week (Mirror front pg last year), and, of course, Rio Ferdinand's cocaine blackmailer who apparently tried to bribe the player with claims he had pictures of him snorting the drug. Ferdinand told the News Of The World that he would be making a complaint to police in this respect. Almost two years later no arrest has been made despite such Ferdinand's allegations of such a serious crime being attempted against him. We wonder why…