Rupert, The Post and Young Nixzmary
by DT - January 25th, 2006 12:36 pm
One of Murdoch’s more lurid properties, the New York Post, has been acting a little out of character, in covering what is usually the most lurid kind of story – the terrible killing of seven year-old Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn.
With a somewhat jaundiced eye I’ve watched mass media swing into pretty thoughtless action over battered children for more than twenty years. The watch began when I spent 20-something months close-quartered with social services staff, making a TV series that highlighted their usually hardworking and well-intentioned, but also too-often doomed, efforts to protect such children. With Nixmary’s death there was the usual “hound ‘em, shame ‘em, fire ‘em� approach to social workers from much of the press and electronic media. Even the normally sober National Public Radio gave in, I felt, to the common knee-jerk reactions.
In the Post, however, although Nixzmary’s unbearable story was inevitably presented with tabloid shock and horror, there was also a real attempt, in a strongly-reported story by reporters Liz Kelley and Susan Edelman, to show how such gut-wrenching tragedies can all too easily happen — and what staggering sets of obstacles confront the workers whose job is to prevent them.
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