A terrible way to report a terrible crime: the hypocrisy and guilt of the media

The police, and the media, in choosing to cover this story in such an emotive way, are guilty of crimes against all sorts of people

The police, and the family of Jessica Chapman, politely asked on Sunday that the media should get out of Soham. The broadcast media obliged, with television bulletins yesterday reporting from elsewhere in Cambridgeshire; near Soham, but not in the town itself.

The press was not quite so self-consciously well-behaved, with many newspapers, including this one, publishing photographs of Soham residents including Agnes Wells, the grandmother of Holly, grieving earlier in the day. Mrs Wells was the closest relative of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman to stray into the path of the media at the weekend, and her appearance was certainly taken full advantage of.

Reporters and columnists tell their readers that they can "only imagine" the anguish of the relatives and friends of these two murdered girls. But the photographers working on the same "stories", and the editors commissioning them, beg to differ. They are only too keen to make the imagination redundant by offering pictures of grief for readers to gawp at – faces awash with tears, contorted by pain – the more suffering, needless to say, the better.

We do not have to "only imagine" this distress at all. Why are we offered images of the suffering of people close to an appalling atrocity? To help with the imaginative exercise of thinking ourselves into the violated minds of Holly and Jessica's parents, as we have been so repeatedly urged to do? What are these photographs of devastated people in Soham meant to tell us? What pain looks like?

Mrs Wells will be too devastated by mourning to be much worried about the way she was plastered over the front page of yesterday's Daily Mail. But parts of the media ought to be a little worried about where such coverage stops being useful and starts being horribly, pointlessly, intrusive. The media prides itself on being in touch with the feelings of the person on the street. And the person on the street has never been more wary of the media.

Here is Alison Palmer, Soham correspondent of the local paper, the Standard, writing last Thursday about the feelings of the townspeople towards the press and television crews that had descended on the town. "Initially we all felt afraid of the media, angry even that they were training their gaze on the Wells and the Chapman families at a time when they must have wanted to be alone in their heartache. But it wasn't long before we realised how much we need them to get the message across to the world that two special little people are missing."

My own feeling is that the media has been damagingly intrusive right from the start of this case, so intrusive that the police inquiry itself, like the Sarah Payne investigation before it, has been largely shaped by its influence and its demands.

Certainly it is right that there should be a symbiotic relationship between the media and the police in the deliverance of justice. But it is hard to escape the feeling that police forces are now ordering their assessment of cases such as this one with an eye to how they will play to the press. The reasons for this are clear: they wish to get maximum publicity and feedback from the public. But can such strategies be right when they clearly involve police spearheading massive public denial?

The police in this case, like the Sarah Payne case, along with the whole of the media, insisted that the possibility of the girls having been killed should remain unspoken, up until the point that they arrested murder suspects. But privately, they could not have believed their own version of events, in which the girls were held captive somewhere but safe, with their abductor caring for them in some twisted way, and monitoring their mobile phone messages.

Sue Carroll writes in the Daily Mirror about how a policeman during the Sarah Payne case told her in confidence that "when they find her, it's going to be, for the family, like falling off a 30-storey building and hitting concrete". What he was clearly saying was that while police and journalists were realistic enough to understand that Sarah Payne had almost certainly been murdered, there was somehow an advantage in not acknowledging this reality either publicly or to the parents of the child.

What is the advantage though? It is well known that the wide coverage gained for the police hours of irrelevant phone calls and pieces of useless information to sift through. Could this time and energy, in both cases, not have been better spent in a wider search of the roadsides around Soham?

The place where the bodies of Holly and Jessica were found is notorious as an area where dead children had been secreted before. Instead, as in the Sarah Payne case, the police have staged an enormous hunt for living girls, via the media and the telephone line. It has fallen to members of the public, independently, to discover the barely hidden bodies that ushered reality into the investigation. Now we're told that the bodies of these two girls are in such a state that formal identification will take days. This information subtly invites us to "imagine" again, this time to imagine what might have been done to the children by their killer to leave them in such a mess.

Such ghastly speculation is far from necessary though, and the invitation to embark upon it possibly quite misleading. The truth is that nearly a fortnight of lying in open countryside in the summer heat would have made the task of forensic pathologists a great deal more difficult. The worry that the delay in finding these bodies may have meant the destruction of some vital piece of forensic evidence is very real.

Of course it is not the police, or the media, who are responsible for this most heinous of crimes. Hopefully the person or people who did this will be punished. But the police and media, in covering this story in such an emotive way, are guilty of lesser crimes, against all sorts of people. They are guilty of crimes of omission, when they decide not to give much coverage to missing people who may be older, or male, or less innocent and sweet than Holly and Jessica. They are guilty of crimes of distortion when they write, yet again, in their scandal-ridden, sleaze-filled pages that Britain has "lost its innocence" yet again.

The truth is simple. The media were on to this story so enthusiastically because it was very likely that it would be just the story that it was. If the press is really interested in finding missing young people, then there are thousands of them, too many for the media to see as good stories.

What has happened here is that a terrible crime has been focused on simply because it is so very, very rare, and has been treated as one that is of immediate relevance to all of us. "A terrible blight is falling across family life in this country," The Sun declares, as it demands that "such a tragedy must never be allowed to happen again". Such empty, emotive rhetoric.

We cannot rid the world of murder, even against children. But we can be thankful that we are never likely to experience such horror, and resist the imprecations of parts of the media, which suggest that we should wallow in the misery of others.

d.orr@independent.co.uk