That evening, Mr. and Mrs. McCann went out to dinner after settling their three sleeping children. The restaurant where they ate was just a few dozen meters from the vacation apartment where they were staying. The couple took turns returning to the apartment every half hour to check on the children. When mother Kate McCann returned to the apartment again at 10 p.m., she found her twin children still sleeping soundly, but little Madeleine was missing, and the doors and windows of the apartment rooms had been left open. Panicked, the McCanns searched the apartment in vain. Local police surveyed the scene and concluded that little Madeleine had been abducted!

The story quickly gained attention in the UK. For days, the search for Madeleine was overwhelming. Posters looking for Madeleine were displayed in local Portuguese stores, pubs, cafes and on street lamp posts. Madeleine's father, Gerry McCann, said, "We are doing everything we can to assist the police in their investigation and are turning over every stone to find our daughter."

Police have repeatedly searched the site of the incident and a 200-square-kilometer area around it, but had not found any information about Madeleine's whereabouts at press time.

The grief and pain of the McCanns was presented in major media outlets, and the heartbreak drew sympathy from the community as people reached out for help.

A British businessman is willing to offer a reward of 1 million pounds for information leading to the girl. Britain's News of the World newspaper launched a bounty totaling 1.5 million pounds. Rowling, author of the novel "Harry Potter," also donated a bounty. At the time of publication, the total bounty had reached ￡2.6 million. Volunteers have set up a special website for the search for Madeleine, and by May 21, the site, called "Bring Madeleine Home," had been visited more than 115 million times.

Madeleine, whose parents are devoted Premier League Everton fans, was wearing an Everton shirt before she disappeared. In desperation, the McCanns came up with the idea of finding their daughter through the influence of a footballer. Everton club owner Bill Kenwright said in an interview, "For this lovely little fan, I think we really should do something."

Everton players walked onto the pitch wearing white T-shirts with Madeleine's picture on them ahead of their final round of Premier League matches against Chelsea. It was a special treat no small fan has ever gotten. At the same time, Chelsea fans put up a huge banner saying "I hope our Maddie (Madeleine's nickname) comes home safely" in a moving display.

Madeline's parents also thought of the influential David Beckham. British media immediately reached out to Beck, who readily agreed to the girl's parents' request. "I want every kind person in the world to act and do everything they can to find her!" Beckham said on TV, holding up a picture of Madeleine.

Fliers with Madeleine's picture were distributed to 60,000 fans watching the European Union Cup match on May 12, Madeleine's fourth birthday. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is expected to become Britain's new prime minister, also met with little Madeleine's relatives on the 12th to offer them help.

The spotlight is dimming

It is rare for a missing little girl to galvanize attention from around the world in such a short period of time. Paul Tursi, head of the UK's Missing Persons Rescue Centre, said, "Before Madeleine's disappearance I had received 450 reports of missing children, but I have never seen a disappearance with such an impact, and it has a globalized social effect ...... How I wish that every missing child could have been given the Madeleine's treatment." And it was the many media outlets that extensively covered the event that gave Madeleine this special treatment.

To a certain extent, the search for Madeleine has become a media-led and driven "media event". In the eyes of communication scholars, media events have a strong social integration function: "These stories integrate society in exciting collective ways and reawaken loyalty to society and legitimate authority." But the scholars' view is clearly overly optimistic, and the media often inevitably bring their own values to bear in creating "mediated events."

In an article in The Guardian, critic Peter Wilby reflects on the special interest shown by the media in Madeleine. He quotes an official of the British Metropolitan Police as saying that subconscious racial bias can be detected by comparing these overwhelmingly touching media reports with the abbreviated coverage of black children who go missing in the nation's cities. Pragmatically, it is true that if the missing child had been blond and well-dressed, the reporting specifications would have been much higher. Moreover, the McCanns, both doctors, are the typical image of middle-class British parents, and misfortune generally rarely happens to such families. In Wilby's view, some of the media coverage was based on the idea that this was a "good subject for a story".

"The door was open but the bed was empty - Madeleine was gone", "Dinner for two ...... and then the parental nightmare began", said some British media reports. The plot in this case is more shocking than a movie script, and when it actually happens in life, it becomes even more appealing.

And yet media enthusiasm is limited. In a May 22 report by Sky UK, it was already noted that the spotlight was dimming: "Kate McCann has just taken their twin children for a walk down the street. For the past two weeks or so, her every move has been recorded by the hundreds of photographers surrounding her. This time, however, only one photographer was filming her. It was a clear sign that the media was starting to think that maybe it was time to leave." The various journalists who gather in that small Portuguese town also now rarely get calls from their editors for articles.

The McCanns were still patient with the media, through which they needed to get more people to recognize Madeleine and help find her. Every reporter still on watch hopes to eventually report a happy ending, but if the story doesn't come to fruition in the near future, there will never be another reporter camped out in front of the McCanns' house. And at that point, they'll just have to put in more effort to keep people from forgetting about it.

The media is not the savior

So the media is not the savior for the "long war" the McCanns are likely to face. Effective social service organizations, rapid information disclosure and early warning mechanisms for missing children, and long-term rational planning to mobilize the whole society are the real guarantee that more missing children will be reunited with their families.

Therefore, many countries attach great importance to the mobilization mechanism of missing children, such as the "Amber Alert" system in the United States and Canada: once the police confirm that a child has gone missing, a series of messages will be sent out, which will be disseminated rapidly through the radio, television, billboards, and even lottery outlets, to maximize the public's request for cooperation.

Various high-tech, low-cost methods are also being used to find missing children. The South Korean Police Agency, for one, has partnered with the country's SK Telecom to send information and photos of children who have been missing for long periods of time to cell phone users for help. In China, in March, volunteers also tried to print information about lost children on poker cards for free distribution to the public.

Reviewing Madeleine's disappearance has given us more dimensions to ponder. For example, from the perspective of social assistance, will the explosive social effects of such a collective media act do exhaustive damage to more sustainable child assistance? These are the thoughts that little Madeleine brings to the world this May.

Now, all we still need to do is pray that Madeleine's smiling face will once again blossom in her parents' arms.