'I don't think necessarily having newspaper headlines with the image

THE father of Madeleine McCann has attacked the news media for putting commercial needs before the facts of his daughter's disappearance and called for coverage to be toned down.

In a surprise attack that singled out the Daily Express and Sky News, but mostly criticised newspapers, Gerry McCann described a feeding frenzy in which the British media repeated speculative reports in the Portuguese press giving them extra legitimacy.

"Clearly they are fuelling each other, " he told the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "There were commercial decisions being made for column inches and time on television."

Echoing comments made by Newsnight anchor Jeremy Paxman about the tendency of TV news to sensationalise stories to be heard amongst so many channels, he said that there had been a failure to separate speculation and fact.

McCann said: "Before [Madeleine's disappearance] I probably believed most of the things you read in the newspapers were true and that almost everything in television had a factual basis.

"There is a responsibility on journalists and producers to present facts or to make it very clear when they are talking about speculation."

Despite a perception that the McCanns and their publicists have run a skilful media campaign to maximise coverage over the inquiry, he insisted he had never wanted or expected as much space to be devoted to it.

He and his wife had only co-operated with the media in the belief that it maximised the chances of getting their daughter back. But he said: "I don't think necessarily having newspaper headlines with the image of Madeleine being thrust on to people every single day actually helps . . . Clearly we have seen irresponsible reporting."

He said he and his wife Kate had decided early on to stop watching the coverage. "We only had Sky [News] at first. There was just a huge amount of speculation and it usually ended up in a very negative way that Madeleine is dead.

"The psychologist was saying, 'You don't know that that has happened' so very quickly we turned the TV off and stopped reading the newspapers, " he said. He added that he and Kate had moved quickly to reassure Portuguese police that they were not the sources of criticism of the inquiry that had appeared in the British press. The police assured them that they would do their utmost to find Madeleine, who has now been missing for 115 days.

The speculation in the Portuguese press, which has reported contradictions in the McCanns' statements and even linked them to their daughter's disappearance, was in his view made possible by a fierce belief in freedom of speech that followed years of military dictatorship. He said that this allows stories attributed to unnamed sources to be printable with no legal comeback.

He pointed to the front page of yesterday's Express, which claimed the McCanns had killed their daughter with a drug overdose, as a "classic example" of a string of British stories that prominently reported anti-McCann speculation from Portugal.

"The majority of it is absolutely wild speculation with no foundation, " he said, pointing to a recent statement by the chief inspector of the inquiry (which was carried in the Express) that said the McCanns were not suspects. "[The stories] are just completely at odds [with the facts]. It's unbelievable, " he said.

Nobody at the Express was available for comment, but a spokesman for Sky News said: "Sky News quickly identified the story as one of significant interest and treated it responsibly throughout.

The appeal posters on our website have been downloaded in their thousands."

GIVEN that McCann had been expected to praise the press and TV news for their role in the hunt for his daughter, he instead ended up agreeing with much of what author Lionel Shriver is expected to say in a speech to the festival this morning.

As reported in the Sunday Herald last week, the award-winning writer of We Need To Talk About Kevin is to tell the TV news industry that it is hooked on hyping up stories like that of Madeleine's disappearance because they share the characteristics of a blockbuster novel.

In an interview she said: "For that one kid to have got that much attention just because she's really cute and white and blonde was disproportionate.

"I would not mean [my criticism of the coverage to be] unsympathetic, but my sympathy extends to any parent who's been in that situation. [Gerry McCann's] heart should go out to them too."

Not all of the audience were convinced by McCann's arguments, however, with one news editor saying afterwards that it was strange for him to have been so critical when he and his wife had done so much to encourage the volume of coverage.

In a question-and-answer session afterwards, when BBC head of news Peter Horrocks pointed out that the McCanns had chosen to give interviews after their daughter had been missing for 100 days, McCann said they had cooperated because they had known that coverage would build at that point.