BRITT LAPTHORNE MEDIA COVERAGE

Every year about 35,000 people go missing here in Australia. Around 1,800 remain missing for period longer than 6 months. Overseas, there are over a million Australians overseas at any one time. We will make around 4 million trips OS in 2008 and around 25,000 will seek some sort of Consular assistance with another 350,000 calling Australian consulates around the world with all sorts of enquiries. Most of these travellers come back in one piece but 200 - 300 will also end up in an overseas hospital each year and another hundred or so never return for one reason or another. They decide to vanish without telling anyone or they go missing in mysterious circumstances. Some of them very mysterious, mostly never making into the news. Unless you are Britt Lapthorne.

Starting with some questions raised on a Facebook page, this case was quickly wound up by the media until it became one of the top media stories over the past month on all Australian media. The early botched investigation, the anguish of the parents, the concerned police and politicians, the warnings to other young backpackers, the finding of a body, the denials, the suspects, the eventual confirmation of the body's identity, the acute emotions of a family coping with a death, the return of the body to Australia. The whole sorry saga was played out at the head story in our nightly news, the lead story on the radio and the front page of the dailies.

Whilst I can't even start to comprehend the extraordinary loss of the Lapthorne family I think that this story deserves a critical look on the way it was reported and it's position on one of the most reported stories of 2008. In some ways it reminds me of the Madeline McCann story... the young British girl who went missing whilst the family was holidaying in Portugal. At the same time a similar scenario was taking place with another British family. Another young girl who went missing in mysterious circumstances, a family in pain desperately trying to do anything to find their daughter. What was the difference between the McCanns and this other family. You guessed it... one was a good looking, media-friendly family who spoke well and cried in front of the camera. The other was a camera shy black family from an unfashionable suburb north of England. Barely a mention in the media.

Let's face it, Britt Lapthorne is young, blond with a media-savvy family and a good looking brother. Again, I don't want to denigrate this family's attempts to do absolutely everything they possibly could to get their daughter back but I wonder about all the other hundreds of missing Australians overseas who we never hear about. Sure, it seems the police cocked up and botched the early investigations, the politicians did every thing they could from their offices 10,000 km away. But all this would be the same if someone went missing anywhere. So what was the story? Where was the value to the wider public? Where was the need to know? Where was the public interest.... I'll tell you.... the media created it all by itself. And they followed each other around like sheep.

Britt Lapthorne died somehow, tragically and mysteriously. But so do hundreds of thousands of people, overseas and here every year. Sure it's tragic. But how this story has made it onto the list of the top national stories for over a month is a very bad reflection on a lazy commercial media who couldn't get their fat butts out of their air-conditioned offices to report something else. Britt Lapthorne is dead and so, it seems, is our media's good judgement.