The total is 48 - 26 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan and 22 have lost their lives in Iraq between May 3 and September 16. Of those 48 men, over half – 25 of them – hadn’t even reached their 25th birthday. The youngest was just 18.

Why May 3 - after all 247 have died since the conflicts began?

Because that’s the date Madeleine McCann was reported missing from a holiday apartment in Portugal. The same date, incidentally, that 22-year-old Guardsman Simon Davison was shot in a vicious gun battle in Garmsir, Afghanistan, and died.

The reason none of us have any idea about who in the last four months died fighting in those two hellish conflicts, is because the media believes we’d all rather read every spit, cough and unsubstantiated rumour in the McCann story instead.

Maybe we would, but they could at least give us the option by, just occasionally, telling us what else is happening in our world.

For instance, also since May 3, at least two thousand people have died in two earthquakes, eight hurricanes and torrential rain and flooding across the globe this summer. Three plane crashes killed 378 people, and a bridge being repaired in Minneapolis collapsed, killing nine, while exactly two weeks later a bridge being built in Hunan Province, China, collapsed killing 28.

Perhaps we’re not especially interested in people dying in natural disasters half-way across the world (obviously unless there are dramatic pictures taken from helicopters and British holidaymakers' mobile phones), but closer to home, an extraordinary 24 Acts received Royal Assent between May 3 and last week.

Among the new Acts setting out how we’ll now do things in the UK, were the Finance Bill; Forced Marriage Act; Gambling Act; Pensions Act; Mental Health Act; Vehicle Registration Marks Act; Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Act; Digital Switchover (Disclosure of Information Act), and, on May 3 itself, The Welfare Reform Act. Read much on any of them in the press?

Or what about the 300,000 people fleeing conflict in the Congo, or hundreds of thousands still trapped in camps in Darfur by the Sudan conflict? What about the growing military links between Russia and China? Or Russia’s much-criticised arms sales to Iran and Syria? What about the, also controversial, $20bn of smart weapons and missiles the US has sold to Saudi Arabia and five Gulf states (and the £4.4bn of jets the UK sold the Saudis)? And the 190,000 guns ‘lost’ by the Americans in Iraq.

And have you seen or heard much about the 16,306 animals now threatened with extinction, according to the 2007 Red List of Threatened Species, published last week?

No? However, back to the McCanns. There will be dozens of media professors an pundits currently counting up the column inches written about the McCanns since May 3 for the basis of books and articles on the celebrity-isation of tragedy.

But the truth is that there has been no actual news to report on the story for almost all of the past four months. The search has sort-of gone on; three British (but no Portuguese) people have been flagged as suspects and questioned; witnesses have been talked to several times; a file has gone to the Portuguese prosecutor and British forensics experts have been involved and sent their report to the Portuguese police. Oh, and two funds have been launched – one to help find Madeleine, one to help her parents fight their corner.

That’s it. No information from the investigation has been officially released, everything else filling the pages and airtime is speculation based on un-named sources. It’s a cut-and-paste job, it’s not journalism and it’s certainly not news reporting.

The reason the media are giving so much coverage to the story, particularly since the McCann’s themselves were interviewed as suspects, is because we the public are apparently glued to the it – we can’t tear ourselves away from the TV, we’re gobbling up every word written in the newspapers and making the story the ‘most read’ on dozens of news sites.

Shame on us. We can’t criticise the lack of responsible journalism in the media while we’re feeding its perception of us as tragedy addicts and gossip obsessives.

However, Sweeble is making a stand. Spit-in-the-ocean-sized stand really given who we are compared to who they are, but I’m making a promise now that the only time we’ll reference or link to a story in Their Newsabout the McCanns or their missing daughter will be when there’s something new and verifiable to report.

Which means it could be weeks or months before there’s another news story on Sweeble about little Madeleine McCann. But that’s the reality behind missing children stories that this speculation-fest is avoiding. Remember Ben Needham?