Unidentified Flying PR Agendas

I’m intrigued by the Daily Mail’s leap to the defence of computer hacker Gary McKinnon and am certain that there’s a certain PR agenda underlying their campaign on his behalf.

Whilst it is utterly in keeping for the Mail to campaign to keep the trial of a man with Aspergers Syndrome in the UK so that he can live a semblance of the life he had and see his mum from time to time – a man who claims that the only reason he hacked into US military networks was to discover if there was evidence of UFOs to be found there – I suspect that the Mail are also keeping in mind how many hits they can get on their website.

There’s no doubt that the McKinnon case is attracting a large amount of interest from the UFO-loving community, a group not normally known for engaging with the world at large, except where it concerns potential visitations from the universe at large. McKinnon is a cause celebre in these circles and the Mail, I am certain, has its eye on attracting them to their website – presumably they are not expecting them to leave the computer to actually buy a paper.

Only time will tell; if we see stories on UFO sightings appearing in the deeper recesses of Mail in the near future, you’ll know I was right. In the meantime, here’s hoping that the surface agenda – keeping a frail man who knows he did wrong but does not deserve to be torn entirely from his family for it – works as well.