Madeleine nonsense

Dear Editor,
I cannot be in a minority when I say that I have had enough of the endless churning in all newspapers (both here and abroad), of spurious “Madeleine stories” which have so transparently been ‘planted’ by people with an axe to grind.
Now, I have no intention of trying to work out who exactly is strategically planting these stories in the media, nor as to the reasons why they are doing so – but what annoys me most is the fact that they invariably have almost zero basis in ‘truth’.
Take the story that seems to have been repeated ad infinitum last week about the OAP paedophile ‘believed to have been in the Algarve at the time Madeleine went missing’ and ‘on the run’ from the authorities (on a well-oiled Zimmer-frame, one presumes) ever since.
Any journalist worth his or her salt could have easily discovered that the man was nowhere NEAR the Algarve in 2007.
In fact, the very tabloid that last week proclaimed that he was, wrote in 2011 that he had been hiding out in New Zealand until 2009!
I think what I am trying to say is that newspapers would do well to question the stories that wing their way on the infernal net… and then perhaps they could go back to doing their jobs properly.
Yours, without prejudice,
Harold Finch
By email