JOURNALISTS HAVE children too. That trite remark is not intended to illustrate the old myth of dispassionate objectivity. Nor is it an attempt, particularly, to give a human face to a sometimes inhumane trade. It's just a fact, and blindingly obvious. Sorry about that.

In this trade we know a little about a lot of things, but there are many things we can never know. How does it really feel to be Tony Blair, or a suicide bomber, or a Saudi princeling? What, if anything, goes on in the mind of a movie star, or a Darfur refugee, or a musical prodigy? We can do youinformation,speculation,andempathy, sometimes. Omniscience is not our game. But parenthood?

That's a species marker, more often than not. It's the reason why new fathers and mothers will bore you witless over dinner with the one topic of which they never tire. It is the subject upon which anyone who has reproduced is an expert, self-appointed. It is,too,thehumanchordthatalwayssounds.

If a miracle should happen in the elapsed time between these words being written and being read, most of what follows will be irrelevant. I'll be the very last to complain. Perhaps reports of a "credible" telephone informant in the hunt for Madeleine McCann will bear fruit. No sane person will then giveatossaboutwhatIthought.Suchhas been the resonance of the thing, for parents above all: nothing matters more than finding the child.

We've all been there. Those 10 minutes in the supermarket or on the beach when you realise thatthephrase"blindpanic"isnocliché.It describes the condition precisely. You cease to see, you cease to think. Or rather, you seem to see everything,instantly,heightenedbeyondyour powers of description. You seem to think every possible thought, rational and irrational. Suddenly youarehyper-aware,yetblindanddeaf.It happenstoeveryparent,soonerorlater.It happens, somewhere, every day.

No-one who has thought about the McCann case has forgotten those facts. How do the child's parents, Gerry and Kate, feel? No parent has to guess. Every parent has lived with the vague dread ofanticipatedloss.Andeveryoneknowsthat children are being lost - somewhere, every day - in a vicious world. It makes the Madeleine phenomenon inspiring and unsettling simultaneously. It also asks very hard questions of journalism.

Years ago, just out of university but with nothing resembling a career to my name, I worked as a night porter in a hospital. Permanent night shift, six times a week for months on end: if there was someone lower on the institutional pecking order I never met him. The hours were long, mostly tedious, but the work was easy enough, with a single exception.

The hospital had large, leafy grounds, with a children's unit tucked away in a far corner. The kids there were very sick, often beyond help. Sometimes, in the small hours, the telephone in the porters' lodge would go off and a nurse would be calling for oxygen cylinders. Instantly. There was a trolley affair for the purpose, but in the darkness, with time short, you had an alternative: put the things on your back and run.

How fast can you run under a pressing weight when a child is dying? You'd be surprised. I even developed the habit - grisly, with hindsight - of timing myself, and I was never a born sprinter. After a few months I also developed a rule: having heard the wrong answer too often I stopped asking thenursesifachildhadmadeitthroughto morning. Those women lived with knowledge I didn't need.

That may be the point, if any, of the tale. Life has menaced the McCanns, menaced the core of their existence, in a manner that most of us dread to contemplate. Is that news? The question is intended to sound harsh. The fact is that your child is at more risk from a drunken or stupid driver than from a predator. The fact is, equally, that Madeleine is not the first child to have been abducted, nor, in this miserable human zoo of ours, will she be the last. Another fact is that accidents, disease, hunger and bombs kill children every moment of every day. But for weeks now only one child has truly occupied our attention.

Is that wrong? Is the fact that the McCanns, their families and friends, have conducted a technically brilliantpublicrelationscampaigntokeep Madeleine's image bright in our minds somehow unsettling, as though demanding that we forget every other infant at risk? Two answers. First, if that "credible" phone call has made a difference, the strategy followed by Gerry and Kate will have been vindicated. Secondly, who dares to blame them?

Again, most parents would respond without even thinking. You do anything, you do everything: whatever it takes. You spend every penny you have, kick open any door, trample over anyone who gets in your way. Melodrama is a temptationindiscussionssuchasthis,butforget quibbles. A parent worth the name would kill to protect a child. Such is the context, I think, for the extraordinary attention paid to Madeleine.

People will remind you, rightly enough, of all the other suffering children in the world. They will tell you about all the missing infants who are never mentioned on the Six O'Clock News. They will ask, knowing the answer full well, whether the pressandthebroadcastersintendtogivethe parents of every starving African baby the aid, comfort and respect offered to the McCanns. Such individuals have a healthy distaste for that strange affair, the media frenzy.

Journalists, some of them, have been wondering about these things too. For weeks they have been covering the story of Madeleine in the knowledge that there has been only a single story, retold endlessly. A child has gone missing and the police have made no progress. Beyond publicising the publicity efforts of Gerry and Kate, there has been nothing to add. In journalism, with its limited attention span, that counts as unusual.

So should the media have treated the McCann story as they treat other stories? Should the media therefore have applied their normal practices if that meant hindering the safe return of the child? Journalists have children too. Yet if those journalists were consistent they would turn their industry intoapublicservice.Everyworthycampaign, every just cause, every child at risk, would receive our attention.

Thereisn'tenoughnewsprint.Thereisn't enough air-time. There is not, to be blunt, enough public interest. When journalism becomes an extended charity advert people switch off: that's the truth, like it - and no-one would admit that, of course - or not. Yet reverse the argument. Lay it, since I'm the one doing the talking, at my door. Would I be writing about any of this were it not for Madeleine? Probably not.

ONE child has come to embody a great mass of social and parental love, fear, distress and unease. In her tiny image there is the reminder that the world is never safe, that misery strikes like a bolt from a clear sky. Last week, in an odd parallel, a report reminded us that we in the West are raising a generation of children who no longer play freely in the streets. Parents will not take the risk, however slight. Parents read of a hit-and-run claiming a child in Edinburgh and draw their own ever-closer.

Medicine has improved since the days when I hauled oxygen cylinders: more children survive. Predators are shocking precisely because they are rare:thechancesareremote.Dietisbetter; schools (for my money) are better; and parents know more about child welfare (or have fewer excuses for ignorance) than ever. Yet the image of one fair-haired infant awakens every nightmare.

Weliveinasocietythathasreducedchild mortality dramatically: perhaps, paradoxically, that is why we fear. We no longer accept that children, Western children at least, can simply die or disappear. Then we are caused to remember that this, too, is one of prosperity's delusions. Fixating on Madeleine we fixate on a thought we cannot utter: poor nameless African children die; this child was supposed to be safe. Suddenly a world is at risk.

Withluckandjustice,though,youwillnot even have read the words "luck and justice" this morning.