The Destruction of the Working Class in Ireland and the UK (Pt. 2)

Bias Within the Mass Media's Portrayal of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews Cases.

The tragic case of Madeleine McCann going missing, was an example of how the child of wealthy parents is prioritized over the lives of ordinary children by the media in the UK (and Ireland, as it absorbed coverage here too).  Studies and comparisons of these cases are ubiquitous across the Internet and bookshelves, so I'll just summarize the two here as an example.  The Madeleine McCann story dominated the papers and television news for weeks, while other important stories were ignored or received little coverage.  In the UK, a child goes missing every three minutes.  On the missing kids.co.uk website, there are currently 8 children missing since the beginning of February this year, yet none of these children received anything like the kind of blanket coverage that the McCann family did. A massive reward of £2.5 million was offered for help in finding Madeleine. 

Regarding the Shannon Matthews case in Britain, an initial reward of £20,000 was raised to £50,000 for help in finding the young girl - still 50 times less than that which was on offer for Madeleine.  The media largely ignored the good work done by the local community in attempts to find the child.  Instead the media tarred all in Shannon's community with one brush as 'professional scroungers', an 'underclass' or, as Melanie Phillips stated;

 'the affair has helped to "reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted... whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied... and where boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought'.

The true reality of the community where Shannon Matthews is from, is that it's a location where '90% of people work'.  Many locals helped in the search for Shannon, and  took money from their own pockets to help with finding her.  But these facts were largely ignored.