By James Anslow MA

Lecturer in Journalism at City University, London

PhD student at the University of Bedfordshire where he is

studying popular newspaper narrative from a Jungian
perspective

He was a production journalist on The Sun and News of the

World for 28 years.

ON March 19 the Daily Express and Daily Star printed

unprecedented front-page apologies to Kate and Gerry
McCann for the outrageously defamatory way in which the
newspapers had covered the disappearance and consequent
police hunt for the couple’s missing four-year-old daughter
Madeleine. Four days later the apologies were repeated,
equally prominently, in the Sunday Express and Daily Star
Sunday. The four stablemate publications acknowledged there
was no evidence to support the theory, encouraged by more
than 100 of their headlines, that Madeleine’s mother and her
husband of nine years, like her a doctor, had caused the
death of their child. All the titles conceded that the couple
were “completely innocent”. The replicated apology was
printed in larger than normal bold type with a prominent
“Sorry” headline. There had been no comparable mea culpa
since The Sun groveled to entertainer Elton John 20 years
earlier following a series of untrue articles about his sex life.
The Sun’s owners News International paid the since-knighted
singer £1million in libel damages; Express Newspapers
handed £550,000 to the McCanns.
However, the Daily Express apology was not its “splash”
(the front-page lead story). That was reserved for another
attractive, 40-year-old mother with a four-year-old daughter:
Heather Mills McCartney, the one-legged, estranged wife of
former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney. The article focused on a 58-
page ruling on her divorce settlement released at the High
Court in London by Mr Justice Bennett. The Daily Express
headline declared in 100-point type (about 4cms deep):

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“Judge Savages Fantasist Heather”. Next to it stood a striking
full-face photograph of a vocal Lady McCartney (whose decree
nisi was not expected until May 12). Above her in the
McCanns panel was an image, the same depth as hers, of a
visibly stressed Kate being comforted by 40-year-old Gerry.
The later Daily Star Sunday apology sat above another splash
about Heather whose 100-point headline screamed: “Mucca
Sex Secrets”. Its opening paragraph began: “A sizzling new TV
show is about to lift the lid on the shocking sex secrets of
Heather “Mucca” Mills.” (Mucca is a popular-newspaper
reference to Paul’s affectionate “Macca” tag.)
The juxtapositions of the Kate and Heather front-page
stories were apposite, for the personalities, actions and
motivations of both female McCs for months had been the
separate targets of a sustained level of vitriolic public
condemnation that, in nearly 40 years as a newspaper
journalist, I have never seen meted out to another British
woman. Heather was dubbed a “one-legged slut bitch devil
whore from hell” by Daily Star Sunday columnist Paul Ross. A
banner headline in The Sun bluntly asked Kate: “Did You
Sedate Maddie?” Another in London’s Evening Standard
stated baldly (and completely falsely) in quotes: “You killed
Madeleine”. The print barrange against both women was
unmatched in its prolonged intensity even by the intermittent
coverage of jailed (now dead) Moors murderer Myra Hindley.
Why? What is it about the portrayal of these two women by
the news media that elicits such a powerful, pervasive and
usually negative response?
To explore this question productively it is necessary to
focus on the represetation of the two “running stories” and
their principals, not the empirical facts informing them; that
analysis can be left to others. Story is a key word for all
journalists. They are fact collectors, investigators and
analysts; they report and interpret societal, cultural, economic
and political events. But the core of their craft is storytelling.
It is what they do. It is what news reporters do. Media
academic John Fiske observes in his book Television Culture:
“The…textual devices that control the sense of news are all
embedded in a narrative form…the differences between news
and fiction are ones of modality.” My own experience as a
journalist supports this conclusion. From my earliest days as a

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teenage reporter on a local weekly newspaper, no news editor
ever told me: “Go and discover the facts.” The imperitive was
always: “Find the story.” The verb and noun are equally
telling: find suggests the narrative was pre-existing, there to
be unearthed, to be chosen from competing ones; story can
refer to a piece of fiction or an out-and-out lie as in “he’s just
telling stories”.
Memorable, often epic and/or didactic, stories can be found
in mythologies and folk tales throughout the world; their
heroes and villains embody bundles of characteristics
repeated across myriad cultures and expressed through
multiple literary vehicles and media platforms. These resilient
and recurring patterns were identified by the influential, but
controversial, Swiss psychologist and thinker Carl Jung (1875-
1961) and labelled “archetypes”. In his Collected Works he
writes: “There are types of situations and types of figures that
repeat themselves endlessly and have a corresponding
meaning.” He claims every archetype is “a real force charged
with specific energy”. It is an aspects of the personal and,
what he named enduringly, “collective” unconscious (a layer
of the psyche containing the same inherited elements as
other people’s). According to him, archetypes cannot be
encountered consciously other than via images or
“projections”, but when employed in a creative work they
“speak through” the author. He did not compile an exhaustive
list of archetypes, but he identified key examples such as
Shadow (Mr Hyde’s Dr Jekyll) and Puer Aeternus or eternal
boy (Peter Pan). Since his death, Jungians and post-Jungians
have discussed many others and plotted their reincarnations
in fairy tales, novels, plays, films and songs. Archetypes
manifest themselves recognisably in all mythological
pantheons; the Trickster figure identified by Jung appears as
the mischievous Norse Loki, the Native American Coyote and
in many other guises. Steven Walker in Jung and the Jungians
on Myth writes: “From the Jungian perspective, then, myths
are essentially culturally elaborated representations of the
contents of the deepest recesses of the human psyche.”
Journalists are authors so, if Jung was right, archetypes
“speak through” their work as surely as their images inhabit
literature and films. In a previous study, I compared
newspaper coverage of Myra Hindley with stories of the

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murderous Hindu female deity Kali. Similarly, I noted parallels
between the arboreal Green Man archetype and the 1990s
reporting of young eco-warrior Daniel Hooper, memorably
tagged Swampy in newspaper headlines; the archetype is also
evoked by Robin Hood and JRR Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil.
Jungians would claim that consumers of news reports respond
to the same collectively unconscious contents as the
journalists who gather, edit and present the stories. Thus,
unconsciously, they expect shared, archetypal, embedded
patterns to assert themselves in the reportage. In a similar
way, a child repeatedly demands to read or hear the actions
and interactions of familiar figures in her night-time fairytales.
These stories are not peripheral to her psychological and
social development: they are core. Social psychologist Vivien
Burr argues in An Introduction to Social Construction that
human beings are “fundamentally story-tellers who
experience themselves and their lives in narrative terms”.
Jungian psychiatrist, analyst and author Dale Mathers told
me in an interview: “Jung’s take on it was that narratives arise
as the result of a dialogue between the collective unconscious
and the personal unconscious; that an individual is attempting
to make sense of the events around them.” He went on: “To a
newspaper reader, what narrative are we going to be
interested in? Narratives that make us socially aware; which
enhance our survival potential. There’s actually a dialogue
between the producer – the journalist – and the public. It’s a
survival dialogue.”
Madeleine McCann – Maddie as she was quickly named by
headline writers – vanished from her family’s holiday
apartment in Portugal’s Algarve on May 3, last year while her
mother and father were eating with friends at a nearby
restaurant. For at least six months afterwards rarely a day
passed without some reference to the event appearing in a
British national newspaper. According to a search on
LexisNexis in November the twin Express titles named her or
Kate within the opening sentence of 518 articles (including
edition changes) published in the182 days that followed her
disappearance. Applying the same search criteria to “World
Trade Center” in the six months following the 2001 terrorist
attack on New York yielded only 340 Express references.
Experienced journalists, including myself, cannot remember

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any event, not involving a celebrity or politician, receiving
more intense and continuous coverage over an equivalent
period than the McCanns story. Veteran former editor of The
Sun Kelvin MacKenzie called it: “The best story of my life.”
Much of the emphasis in many of the articles about the
McCanns in the Express titles and other UK newspapers was
on Kate. Headlines about her were generally sympathetic until
she and her husband were named as suspects or “arguidi” by
Portuguese police last September. Then, with varying degrees
of hostility, the tenor of the coverage by popular newspapers
changed dramatically. Leading publicist Max Clifford said the
publications went “from best friend to worst enemy”.
Headlines ranged from the Daily Mirror’s implicatory
“Accidental Homicide” to the legally unrepeatable excesses of
the Express group. The subject fuelled private and public
conversations in the UK and overseas. At the time of writing
the Help Find Madeleine group on the Facebook social
networking has almost 10,000 members. It competes with the
Prayer For Madeleine and Search For Madeleine groups.
Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian on September 12:
“The British collective conversation is not focused on the war
in Iraq or the efficiency of the NHS, even if it should be.
Instead, its great preoccupation is the disappearance of
Madeleine McCann.”
Kate is a General Practitioner. She is a devout Catholic with
twin children as well as Madeleine. Gerry is a cardiologist. The
couple are white, middle class, youthful, articulate,
photogenic and telegenic. The opinions of readers, bloggers
and journalists about Kate broadly splits into two camps
(neither of which in any way necessarily reflect the truth
about her):
1) She is a fun-loving blonde preoccupied with keeping fit and
looking good who was too busy cavorting with friends to
ensure the safety of her child. This option sometimes includes
the untrue accusation that, in some way, she is responsible
for, or complicit in, the disappearance of her daughter, a claim
she has always denied.
2) She is a caring mother and loving wife who is the victim of
a monstrous crime over which she had no control.
A selection of blog postings show far more favouring the
former proposition. A blogger called Angry Mother wrote (sic):

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“I cant believe she can get up look at herself in the mirror and
make herself all pretty…make up hair done lovely pretty
earrings etc...she should wake up and be dead inside with her
little girl gone but no we look like we dont have a care in the
world. Show some bloody motion please…and apparently she
had ivf to have these children then to get bored and want to
have the single uncomplicated life back so just leave three
babies alone in a country they dont know its just plain silly
and more so totally selfish and DOCTORS my god do i have to
say more …” Angela wrote on the same blog thread: “Yes I
too noticed she always managed to get to the hairdressers to
have her roots done prior to their appearances anywhere.”
Heather Mills is a former model who married multi-
millionaire Paul McCartney in 2002, four years after the death
of his first wife Linda from cancer after 29 years of marriage.
Heather and Paul had a child, Beatrice, in 2003. Linda had
been a photographer, vegetarian and animal rights
campaigner. By contrast, Heather, acording to the Daily Mail,
had taken parts in a photoshoot with a male model with whom
she performed simulated sexual acts. The News of the World
accused her of prostituting herself to wealthy Arabs and
indulging in paid-for group and lesbian sex when she was in
her 20s. As her divorce proceedings grew more bitter, press
headlines about her became increasingly condemnatory. The
Sun shouted: “Mucca Tries It On Again” and “Some Shots
Even Too Low For Mucca”. In October, Heather invoked Kate
McCann during an emotive GMTV interview. She said (sic):
“Look what they’re doing to the McCanns. The woman has
lost, and the poor father, have lost their daughter. What are
we doing as a nation?”.. Scathing press coverage and blog
comment followed. One incensed blogger posted a video clip
of it and sarcastically compared it to another featuring a giant
collection of plastic balls used in a children’s “bouncy castle”
and carrying the title: “A load of balls.”After her divorce
settlement was announced, Heather was branded
“Pornocchio” in a Sun banner headline and “Lady Liar” in the
Daily Mirror.
It has been argued that the hostility towards Kate is fuelled
by “class envy” and Guardian journalist Kira Cochrane claims
“misogyny” is at the root of the Heather coverage. Indeed,
media commentator Peter Wilby linked negative coverage of

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the two women with that of two other mothers: Karen
Matthews, whose daughter Scarlett went missing in West
Yorkshire, and Fiona MacKeown whose daughter Shannon was
murdered in Goa. Wilby observed wrily: “Verily, it is easier for
a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a woman
to meet the standards required by the British press.”
However, archetypally, there is another, more profound,
force driving and linking the blistering dual reportage. To
understand it, Heather needs to be seen as one half of a
Janus-like whole: the other half is Paul’s first wife Linda. When
Linda married Paul in 1968 she already had a child. They had
three more together and were perceived as “inseparable”.
Throughout their 29 years together, Linda launched a range of
vegetarian foodstuffs and was closley associated with animal
rights issues. In many ways she was seen by the public as a
saintly wife, mother and human being. There was widespread
public sympathy when she died from cancer and her death
solidified her public persona. The contrast with Paul’s later
lover, then wife, could not have been starker. Unlike the
irreproachable Linda’s career, Heather’s was publicly racy and
sexually-charged. Despite her model’s face and figure – unlike
her predecessor – she was physically handicapped, after
losing a leg in a car accident before meeting Paul. Linda was
dark-haired, Heather is blonde. She also shared the name
Heather McCartney with Paul’s adopted daughter, Linda’s
child by her first husband. Heather Mills’ relationship with Paul
developed in the four years following Linda’s death and
culminated in their marriage and the birth of a child. The
marriage quickly fractured with Heather and Paul swapping
acrimonious claims and counter claims in the press. The Daily
Mirror reported: “Heather Mills stuck the knife into Sir Paul
McCartney yesterday by playing a tape in which he allegedly
admitted hitting first wife Linda.”
Heather’s persona, as described in newspapers, and the
media in general, is the opposite of Linda’s. She is portrayed
as crippled both physically and emotionally – by a background
of sexual modelling and prostitution. Normal conventions of
reporting disability are dispensed with by popular newspapers
when covering Heather; The Press Complaints Commission’s
Code of Conduct (to which all UK national newspapers
subscribe) states in Paragraph 12: i) The press must avoid

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prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race,
colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical
or mental illness or disability. But this did not stop the Daily
Star describing the McCartneys’ then proposed divorce
settlement as “£120,000 for every leg-over”. Heather is
portrayed as the sexual blonde and Linda the motherly
brunette. A critic might see Heather as having the “temerity”
to usurp the very name of blameless Linda’s daughter. In
Jugian terms, Heather is Linda’s Shadow: the unconscious
content of Linda’s psyche. The newspaper representations of
these two women embody the “sacred prostitute” archetype
described by Jungian Nancy Qualls-Corbett in her book of that
name as the “eternal aspect of the feminine”. It is explicitly
manifest in the deity Isis, an ancient Egyptian fertility figure
described by Mathers as “both virgin and whore”, and implied
in the Biblical juxtoposition of the Virgin Mary and Mary
Magdaleine. This eternal seeming paradox is expressed by the
phrase “tart with a heart” and is played out in many fictional
vehicles: the saloon girl and the prim schoolteacher in
Holywood westerns; Rosetta and Mimi in La Boheme; Carmen
and Cristina in Carmen; the White Witch and Snow White in
the folk story turned film. It also informs the coverage of Kate
McCann.
As described above, newspaper representations of her
swing from perfect mother to racy reveller. Unlike Linda and
Heather, her news persona contains her own opposites. The
(false) implied attacks on Kate and Heather’s parenting skills
(as well as those of Fiona MacKeown and Karen Matthews)
invoke another deeply experienced and projected archetype:
the Terrible Witch Mother. She is the grotesque and perverted
Shadow of “Mum” portrayed by the Brothers Grimm in Hansel
and Gretel. To millions of UK newspaper readers she was Myra
Hindly.
Whatever critics sometimes claim, journalists do not
intentionally write fairytales. But sometimes myth is there in
black and white.

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