The media is friend and foe to the McCanns

But I am also aware that there are downsides to the wall-to-wall coverage and a fine line between sympathy and prurience. Then again, who would not be interested in such a human story? Getting the balance right is virtually impossible.

Here are a couple living through a nightmare and we know this, not simply because we imagine it, but because we can witness the pain etched into their faces as they feature daily on television news bulletins.

For more than three months since Madeleine vanished their grief has been a public event. It has been a real-life soap opera, a psychological drama with which readers, viewers and listeners have clearly identified.

I'm uncertain whether the McCanns consciously tapped into this by seeking global publicity as the best way of tracing their daughter.

But newspapers certainly did. In the early weeks, despite the unprecedented coverage, I argued that the media-savvy couple had adopted an understandable strategy. I realised that there were drawbacks. The media is, by its nature, an uncontrollable beast.

Within a day it can change from friend to foe, moving rapidly from compassion to scepticism, on to cynicism and then aggression. Suffering from acute attention deficit disorder, it also moves swiftly from story to story and, if forced to stay long with one, incessantly seeks out new, and often bizarre, angles.

However, I readily acknowledge that the story has enormous reader interest. It's the water-cooler topic of the summer. People have been talking about it incessantly since it broke, debating every twist and turn.

Though no one would be crass enough to boast it has sold papers, the figures suggest that it has made a difference to circulations.

There were interesting questions about some aspects of the early coverage. Were the popular papers guilty of xenophobia in their relentless criticisms of the Portuguese police? Did the fact that the McCanns are middle-class with respectable jobs in medicine and strong religious faith engender the press's benevolent view towards them? Surely papers were guilty of prejudicial reporting when the police foolishly named a man as the prime suspect? As the weeks passed it was noticeable that coverage became more sensationalist.

Some papers, relying on unsourced briefings, headlined all manner of false leads and dead ends, accompanied by highly speculative theorising. Indeed, the BBC's head of news, Peter Horrocks, has accused ITV of "treating rumour as being newsworthy" and attacked the media for seeing the story as "a potential commercial opportunity".

Much of the popular paper coverage has been infected with a cloying emotionalism in which rationality has played little part. But there have also been genuine developments which had nothing to do with the McCanns, not least the Standard's genuine revelation that a sniffer dog had found blood in the apartment.

This came shortly after Gerry McCann had visited the US and undergone a TV grilling about whether he and his wife were right to leave their children alone without a babysitter, the precursor to signs of greater scepticism in the British press.

All along, trying to strike a balance between sympathy and scepticism has been a dilemma for the press, though I did find myself nodding vigorously as I read a piece by Deborah Orr in last week's Independent.

She argued that the journalistic emphasis has been on sensation and emotionally-driven speculation rather than sober reporting and investigation. The sympathy, in other words, was often skin-deep, an excuse to indulge in "a horrible sick activity".

That isn't true of every paper or every journalist, of course. The McCanns would probably disagree anyway, accepting that some tasteless coverage was outweighed by the need to keep the case at the top of the news agenda.

But I am worried for them all the same. I think they face a more profound drama in future because they will be lifelong "victim celebrities".

Everything that happens to them and their other children as they grow up will be headline news. Every anniversary will provide a peg for news and speculation.

If Madeleine remains a missing person, papers will continually report "sightings" as with Lord Lucan and thus foster yet more anguish for the family.

My heart is with the McCanns but my head tells me their nightmare will never end and that the media will be both a friend and a foe to them in their grief.