I was searching for some news on Google today, which is something I do on a regular basis of course, but today what got my attention was that there were 186 news stories relating to the missing Madeleine McCann. You know what I mean, those little green links below the latest news stories, etc. that say ‘ ‘read all XXX news stories…’.

The McCann story is still big news so I wondered if the same level of interest was being given to Rhys Jones, the young Liverpool boy that sadly lost his life at the hands of some gangster wannabe. After all, Mrs McCann is from Liverpool, both have lost a precious child so it seemed natural to make the comparison.

Well the Jones case had 26 news stories lined up at the same time as the McCann’s 186. There was no contest, the missing girl story was big news but the murder of a young boy at aged 11 was ‘not so hot’. To me it seems incredible that one story can get all the attention when it is hard to separate fact from fiction as in the McCann’s case and the other can maintain almost no interest even though the facts are clear: a boy died of gunshot wounds in some sort of alleged gang war revenge attack. Interesting comparison and extremely sad too.

Now I do not mention this out of pure coincidence. I do not really believe in coincidence. I mention it because, although I cannot make much sense of either case, I do think there is something almost mysterious at work here, something based on…well I’m not quite sure but let us call it money for the sake of semantics.

Earlier this week, a picture of a girl resembling Madeleine McCann was published. It was said to be from a Spanish tourist visiting in Morocco, etc. Well you know the story.

The first thing I always do in these cases is take a closer look at the photograph. Being a photographer and a made not born cynic, I never trust photographs. In this case my hunch appeared to be correct. The human eye is insufficiently able to spot any corrections that may have been made to a photograph, but Photoshop is a wizard at both making and spotting things ‘not quite right…’. I took a photograph from the Reuters website, the photo was marked with ‘REUTERS’ so I assumed it must be theirs to publish and distribute.

When the photograph of this man carrying the girl was enlarged to 1200 pixels by 1224 pixels (the photograph had already been cropped before publication) it was obvious that a black ‘line’ had been placed around some of the girl’s face and the area above the shoulder of the man and the trees background. When I say line, at this enlargement it looks like a line of black dots or ‘splodges’ if that assists in understanding it.

Clearly the photograph had been ‘doctored’ for some reason. In many cases this is something picture editors require to make a photograph more acceptable to the audience. In this case it was a blatant case of concealing the ‘join’ between two photographs that had been put together to make a completely different one.

Now why would Reuters want to do that? Or did Reuters miss this. I think not. However, what I do understand is that pictures sell papers and make money in the process and maybe Reuters ignored this ‘alteration’, which was also accompanied by a further ‘change’ where the girl’s pink blouse or top merged into the white arm of the man carrying her. As far as doctored photographs go, this one was not very professionally done.

Maybe the originator had done this? I do not know but sorting facts from fiction is not easy in this case as I have already indicated. I notified two news sources at exactly the same time. I emailed my concerns and evidence to Sky News and News24. During that very same day, about three hours after my email left my computer, Sky News had claimed the photograph was ‘not of Madeleine’. They said it was of someone else and immediately showed pictures of this ‘someone else’ being carried by a man similar to the one in the REUTERS ‘Madeleine’ photograph.

Did Sky know this Reuters photograph was faked? Did Sky know about the real girl and the man carrying her well before the ‘Madeleine’ photo ever made the pages of nearly every newspaper around the world? I do not know the answer to that question but I wonder about what conspiracies have been and are being concocted about a missing girl, where the parents are being openly accused of involvement in her absence. To my knowledge no-one has announced this photograph to be faked or doctored and if so for what reason.

Is it part of some complex plan to divert attention from the McCann’s being implicated? Something more simple by way of keeping attention to the missing Madeleine in the public domain? I do not know, but like many of the population my imagination is as rife with misgivings aboutr this case, especially where I see that the McCann’s have a seemingly unlimited supply of money to ‘fight their corner’, to hide a hire car from the public domain in a villa in Portugal, to offer to make forensic tests at their own expense and so on.

The parents of Rhys Jones must simply wait for some kind member of the public to surface above the terror that is mod rule in order to get justice for the tragic loss of their young son. The class distinction that is 'money' is clear. Even where both mothers are from Liverpool, there is clear evidence of the middle and ruling classes attempting to ‘protect their own’. The more they do so, the more the suspicion that someone has something to hide. A cynical British public thirsts for the unravelling of such events and newspapers will be there to give out and pick up the cash. Falsified photographs, for whatever reason, can only add intrigue to concern.

As for Mr and Mrs Jones, I just trust that sense will prevail and witnesses will come forward. After all there were witnesses to Rhys’ death. In the case of Madeleine there apparently was none, except the abductor or the murderer.

The first thing to go in war is truth as they say. Well a war between the classes is no exception. Money can get at the truth and it can also disguise the truth. In a society where some of the media fixes telephone competitions and these are only just becoming exposed, expect the fictions to outnumber the facts for a long while yet.