The British girl, 3 at the time of her disappearance, was on holiday with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and siblings when she vanished from an apartment in the central area of the resort. Madeleine’s parents have said that they left her unsupervised in a ground floor bedroom with her two-year-old twin siblings while they ate at a restaurant with friends about 120 meters away.

On September 7^th, Kate and Gerry McCann were named as “arguidos” (suspects) after the Portuguese criminal investigation police suspected them of having removed the body of the child following an accidental death.
This new twist and turn in the investigation occurred a few months after local resident Robert Murat, a man with dual British-Portuguese nationality was indicted on May 15^th, becoming the first official suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

According to the Portuguese Police, several other persons were questioned over the disappearance of Maddie, including the McCanns’ friends. In June, a mystery sample of DNA was reportedly found in the bedroom from where Madeleine disappeared. The DNA did not match that of the McCanns, their three children nor that of Murat.

The investigation kept however focusing on the McCanns. Shortly after they were given “arguidos”, the analysis of samples returned from the Forensic Science Service revealed that Madeleine’s body could have been put down in the boot of the family’s hire car five weeks after she disappeared. A theory that the McCanns have always refuted, claiming that the vehicle had been hired some 25 days after the disappearance.
The results eventually were not considered convincing enough by the prosecution, as forensic science experts pointed to the dangers of contamination.

In early February 2008, the national director of the PJ said that there “perhaps should have been another assessment” before the McCanns were declared “arguidos”.This statement was pronounced shortly before the Portuguese Justice Minister Alberto Costa revealed earlier this week that the inquiry was coming to an end.  

Even so, the coming end of the inquiry does not take the media and public attention away from the case. The story has known a new twist and turn on February 21^st, after Maddie was reportedly spotted with a man in a restaurant in South of France. The French Police declared however the glimpsed child was not Madeleine McCann. 

Such a testimony is not the first one since the toddler disappearance. Many sightings were reported notably in Portugal, in Morocco and elsewhere in the world, but no one produced any firm leads so far. In late October, Jerry and Kate McCann released an artist’s painting of a man whom they believed could have kidnapped their daughter. 

Speculations over the child’s disappearance are numerous, but one question is still pending: “What happened to Maddie?”
So far, the mystery remains unsolved.

“Americans are terribly preoccupied by themselves” stated Susan Moeller (1999, pg 14) in her book Compassion Fatigue. As a matter of fact, an event seems to catch the media’s attention on the condition that the United States is involved in the story. Americans need to be linked to an event in way or another to feel concerned. Media and American media in particular, require symbols to find a story newsworthy. The image of a statue of Saddam Hussein overthrown by an American char and shown over the world is a good example of how such “conventions” guide the American news agenda.

News is a man-made product. The role of the media is thus to give the public stories that are believed to be politically, culturally or economically newsworthy. Fishman (1980)[2] established that journalists led news “by making decisions on their beat structure rather than on news values”[3]. This beat structure consequently favours the “entertaining side” of the event to stimulate the public interest, such as the example of the story of the American soldier Jessica Lynch.[4] As a consequence ongoing conflicts tend to loose their value. In other words, the “Attention to a novel or unusual stimulus lasts as long as it creates a difference between what is seen and the person’s schema (Carolyn Rovee-Collier, 1989)[5]. Moreover, given that the Iraqi war remains a priority of the US government, as the media attention on this issue reveals, it seems like there is no place enough for Somalia or even other regions at war on the front of the “stage”.

Since the US air strikes in Somalia last year, the country is now at a deadlock. Nothing new is happening so the media turn away because editors don’t want to send correspondents to cover events they know will not appeal to their audience.
This results in the American media relying ever more on the major Western news agencies to cover “stagnant” ongoing conflicts, such as the Somali conflict. However, even the news agencies end up loosing interest in these remote regions. In Susan Moeller’s book (1999, pg 11), Tom Kent, international editor at the Associated Press explained: “Basically, in our coverage we cover things until there’s not much new to say”. This leads to a vicious circle since images play a preponderant role in the coverage of conflicts. Without images, a story such a war cannot concretely exist in the minds of the public or is at least hardly newsworthy.

 The progressive disinterest for the ongoing conflicts leads to an unawareness of these regions. The trend which consists in stereotyping peoples into a dehumanized community raises the question of ethics and objectivity that all journalists should consider. “Practices such as seeking multiple witnesses to an event, disclosing as much as possible about sources, and asking many sides for comments” described by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2001, pg 71) are often put aside in favour of a valorisation of the Western countries such as the United States, whether they are political or economical. It is believed that the Internet plays a role in this practice, since reporters can now have easier access “to stories and quotes without doing their own investigation” (Geneva Overholser, 1998).[6] This does not encourage journalists to investigate accurately in countries such as Somalia where the system of clans and the religious wars are often particularly hard to understand. 

Suffering from a lack of media coverage, Somalia seems to illustrate how news focus does not depend on the seriousness of the story. Particularly in the broadcast field, the media does not cover a country because it is at war, but because the country in which the story is reported has a vested interest in the matter in question. Some essential rules of journalism are thus often put aside in favour of “catchy” stories. However, I am convinced that the public is interested in what the media wants him to know; speaking about these regions only in terms of momentary “newsworthy-and-marketable events” reveals serious failings in terms of journalistic investigation.

Subsequently to McKeown’s story, the journalist Nick Martin-Clark (2003) tried to explain his actions arguing that Chris Frost, chair of the NUJ Ethics Committee, once told him ‘that it was sometimes permissible to “act as a citizen”’.[2] Journalists are citizens, and when “there is an overriding public interest in identifying the sources”[3], the reporters’ duty of confidentiality should not be unconditional. However, I believe that this kind of situation should remain exceptional, as defined by the law,[4] and only be applied when justice is the only way of ensuring public wellbeing. In John v Express,[5] Lord Woolf (2000) observed: “…before the courts require journalists to break what a journalist regards as the most important professional obligation to protect a source, the minimum requirement is that other avenues should be explored”.[6] In fact, even if no one is above the law, a good journalist cannot do his job properly acting only from a “citizen’s point of view”. Through his political, religious, cultural beliefs, a citizen is anything but objective. On the other hand, objectivity should be the essence of a good journalist. Beyond any consideration, the protection of sources of information must be a priority.[7]  

Indeed, revealing sources can be very dangerous for both sources and journalists. In my view, ethics and morality should be, as a consequence, the professional’s main concerns when dealing with the protection of sources. Even if there are circumstances under which journalists should not protect their sources (see above), breaking a pact of confidentiality reveals a lack of integrity from the reporter whom sources trust. Some people put their lives in danger to speak to reporters. Therefore, the European Court of Human Rights (2002) stated that “sources may be deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of public interest”.[8] And this would be a real backward step for the profession. Moreover, as Geneva Overholser (2004) says, it is “incontestable that some information vital to a democratic public will reach it only through the protection of confidentiality”.[9] 

This means that a journalist has to be able to justify why, in the public interest, revealing his source is more important than all the wrongdoings that could be disclosed to the public through the source’s revelations. When Martin-Clark (2003) explained to justify what he did that “he felt he could not live knowing such a secret”[10], it clearly proves that he followed his human instincts before his journalistic ones. I do not mean that journalists are robots who cannot have feelings.  I mean rather, that Martin-Clark ran counter to the code of deontology that hallows professional confidentiality. In other words, could you imagine a criminal’s lawyer bound by strict confidentiality, revealing to the court that he knew his client was a dangerous murderer? It would be totally against the rules of ethics. Comparing both professions on the issue of professional confidentiality, Pete Williams from America’s NBC News (2006) said, “It’s the client’s privilege that the lawyer is protecting […] So by comparison here […] it is the source’s privilege that the journalist is protecting”[11]. 

Taking into account these facts, I would argue that Martin-Clark should not have disclosed the identity of his source, no matter what the revelation was. In Martin-Clark’s case, no impending danger was harming public safety. His anonymous source did not reveal he was about to commit a crime; this man had already killed and was serving a sentence at the time of his interview with the freelance journalist. In this kind of situation, the protection of the professional relationship between the journalist and his source is much more important than the actual worth of the information collected. As Rachid Nini (2007) said to justify his refusal to cooperate with justice, “I am a journalist, not a cop”[12]. On the other hand, Judith Miller’s decision not to disclose her source is questionable. It is well known how dangerous it is for an undercover CIA agent to be named. Moreover, it would have been in the public interest to reveal what some members of the American government were hiding from their citizens about the invasion of Iraq.

Despite laws protecting journalists’ sources, many courtrooms, even in democratic countries, still consider the refusal of journalists to disclose their sources as an obstruction of justice. This is to say that protecting their sources is a responsibility that journalists have to take on their own, most of the time. A journalist cannot do a good job without a deep concern for ethics and morality. Sources are a gold mine for reporters, and in consequence, a journalist should never give his word to a source lightly. Only serious cases defined by the law should allow a journalist to break a promise. To avoid being confronted by such problems, journalists should appeal to anonymous sources carefully. Relying on anonymous sources is often a risky way, and it has been proved several times in the past that some whistleblowers are not always well-intentioned. The actual job of a journalist is to inform the public, and as often as possible, to make people speak “on the record”. The “off the record” practice should never become automatic, when other ways remain possible to get a piece of information. That would prevent many journalists from being jailed on behalf of the protection of sources.