To be honest I'm getting pretty tired of the McCann coverage... as terrible as it is what's happened to Madeleine, I cant see why her disappearance should be favored and publicized more than other missing children cases. If I was a parent of a missing child all I'd be thinking of is why people weren't putting the same effort into finding my child.
The McCanns should donate the money from the Madeleine fund to a missing children's charity like SafeKids or some other charity, that way we could help ALL the missing and abducted children out there not just Madeleine McCann.

I think that a lot of the Madeleine McCann reporting has carried a disappointing undertone of condescension toward the Portuguese police - a sense that 'these continentals can't organise the hunt properly and that if she had gone missing in the UK she would have been found by now'. I am not certain of all the ins and outs of the case and don't want to talk out of turn, but I do think that although the Portuguese police haven't covered themselves in glory here the attitude of British media (more print media than TV I'd say) towards them has been biased.

More generally, I think that every so often - five years or so - Britain indulges in orgies of grief. The Bulger murder, the death of Diana, and now the McCann case. All tragic events, but I often find the public interest in these sorts of cases more ghoulish than moving. I'm not sure 24-hr rolling news helps anyone in these cases - the victim, the families or the police investigating (under a jurisdiction and legal system which the British public and media do not understand, in the McCann case)