Pressing times - media twists and turns

I was reminded on this blog that the reporter who decided that Robert Murat (of the Madeleine McCann case) was a suspect was Lori Campbell of the Sunday Mirror. This is a youtube of her in action. She could have been speaking about herself and her rag!



And then there is Martin Brunt, the crime reporter from Sky News. He has the look of a lost ferret trying to find a trouser leg. This is his take on the McCann case in Portugal.



The trouble with these characters is that they are paid handsomely to speculate and spew out their notions in a very casual manner. Brunt has been in Bristol following a similar pattern of thought process.

From Sky News -
Sky News' crime correspondent Martin Brunt, in Bristol, said that after Jefferies had spoken to Sky News there were questions surrounding his claim. "I think he first told neighbours that he thought he had seen Miss Yeates leaving with two people before he spoke to the police, but when we spoke to him he seemed rather vague about the details," he said. "It then became a bit of mystery and it almost was a case of things not adding up." He added: "Police now have up to 96 hours to either charge him, release him on bail for further questioning, or release him with no further action. "It's important to stress at this stage that he has simply been arrested on suspicion of her murder and he hasn't been charged, and it may well be that he is not charged."

Maybe Dominic Grieve should tap Brunt on the shoulder?

Some wise cove has suggested on a webchat site that Christopher Jefferies will "get over it". Nobody gets over it. None of these things can be forgotten. Not one person involved in such cases. Joanna Yeates' boyfriend has quite rightly rounded on the media. Just going around pointing the finger does no good whatsoever. It certainly does not help grieving relatives who only see a circus of thoughtless clowns.

Chris Jefferies, the flattened flat and Bristolian innuendo

It seems that the landlord of the flat rented by Joanna Yeates has caused people's tongues to wag. Wag so much that the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, has stepped in to tell them to hush it all up. I said in a previous post that it is all getting a bit out of hand. It is far better that the police get on with their work unaided by prejudicial gossip. Anyone with a grudge against public schools, homosexuals, eccentrics, landlords of "mansion" properties, neighbourhood watch schemes or even the Prayer Book Society have all waded in giving their ten cents worth of nods and winks. It's all rather unseemly.

Now I read that the forensic teams have almost gutted Chris Jefferies' flat. Interestingly, I notice that the media is getting chummy. He's gone from Christopher Jefferies to Chris Jefferies. It sort of makes him "known". If I was caught up in such a situation, I'd be thinking of officers, some of whom look no older that 18, sifting through my personal belongings. It's rather like an impersonal version of an airport search. I had one of those at Minneapolis by a nordic fellow with piggy fingers. He left all my stuff on the carousel! Welcome to Ellis Island and the rest.

What if Mr.Jefferies is released on Monday? Is he just handed back his belongings in plastic binliners? Or will the police come round and do a makeover in true TV reality show style? Nobody is asking these sort of questions. But I can't help thinking that two and two still makes 54 in many peoples minds. I well remember being involved in a police enquiry when one of my sisters came across a flasher. She was about ten or eleven. The police acted promptly, never found the flasher, but I remember one policeman giving out names of likely offenders as if we might have known him. They took the shorts my sister was wearing away with them. The one thing that comes to mind when I think of this is that the shorts were never returned, as promised. My mother would bring this up every so often as if to remind us that there was an element of untrustworthiness about the whole thing. I'm sure she was more concerned over missing property than a flasher on the loose.

Finding perpetrators of ghastly crimes is not easy. People mislead, people say things they think are true. Apparently Christopher Jefferies is in this position because he got muddled up about what he saw or didn't see. I don't know. But I do know that people can get their lives turned upside down in a moment. I have been stopped by the police twice in my life by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police were only doing their job. As innocent as I may have felt, it was still a mental strain explaining things in response to their questions. The police are drawn from society. They are not given special powers from Heaven. If we jump to conclusions, they may too!