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A three-year-old blonde girl with a big-brimmed hat disappears from the room where she was sleeping with her siblings. The story makes the splash in the Daily Star, the puff in the Express and finds a home in all the tabloids.
It's not hard to see why - and it's not because the papers are concerned for the welfare of little Chloe Campbell.
Would this Australian story have made even a filler without the opportunity to liken it to that other famous vanishing child and the similarity of this photograph to the one of Madeleine McCann in her floppy pink hat?
This, they wrote, was a "copycat abduction". For the Star, (in spite of the absence of any evident link between the two children) it was: "Maddie shock: new victim snatched".
Chloe "vanished" from the sitting room of her home in Queensland on Wednesday. The window was open and there were "adult footprints" on the car parked outside. This afternoon - nearly two days after she was first reported missing - the little girl wandered back home.
Joy unconfined.
By this stage our tabloids' websites were in overdrive - a live blog on the Mirror, constant updates on the Mail and Star (the Sun doesn't seem bothered) and all, naturally, say that Chloe has been "dubbed the Australian Maddie". By whom? By them of course.
It was clear from the start that this was no "copycat abduction", but the obsession with the McCann story is such that any opportunity to revive must be grasped without delay - and definitely without thought.
Chloe has now been reunited with her "delighted", "relieved" parents. But there are too many oddities in this story for comfort. Let's hope tomorrow's celebratory stories don't look too misguided in a few days' time.
It's not hard to see why - and it's not because the papers are concerned for the welfare of little Chloe Campbell.
Would this Australian story have made even a filler without the opportunity to liken it to that other famous vanishing child and the similarity of this photograph to the one of Madeleine McCann in her floppy pink hat?
This, they wrote, was a "copycat abduction". For the Star, (in spite of the absence of any evident link between the two children) it was: "Maddie shock: new victim snatched".
Chloe "vanished" from the sitting room of her home in Queensland on Wednesday. The window was open and there were "adult footprints" on the car parked outside. This afternoon - nearly two days after she was first reported missing - the little girl wandered back home.
Joy unconfined.
By this stage our tabloids' websites were in overdrive - a live blog on the Mirror, constant updates on the Mail and Star (the Sun doesn't seem bothered) and all, naturally, say that Chloe has been "dubbed the Australian Maddie". By whom? By them of course.
It was clear from the start that this was no "copycat abduction", but the obsession with the McCann story is such that any opportunity to revive must be grasped without delay - and definitely without thought.
Chloe has now been reunited with her "delighted", "relieved" parents. But there are too many oddities in this story for comfort. Let's hope tomorrow's celebratory stories don't look too misguided in a few days' time.
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