Too damn little, too damn late

The Independent has this to say about Martin Brunt, crime "reporter" for Sky News.

Brunt accepts that the way that the story was handled by his and other media organisations was imperfect.

Imperfect?

That is not how I would describe a seemingly deliberate, across the board, coordinated attempt to take two middle-class parents who knowingly and frequently abandoned their children, and turn them in to Mr and Mrs Mary Poppins - an example to all parents.

"It's the view of a few of us that when we look back over the first two or three weeks of the coverage we were in some ways over-sympathetic. We kind of adopted the tone and the language that the family did. I think we perhaps lost our objectivity a bit, we became a bit too subjective about the story."

That is no excuse. You are allegedly reporters - it is your job to be, "objective." It is your job to ask the questions I and many others have been asking for weeks.

Right from the start there have been glaring discrepancies in the story - but the British media went out of their way to gloss these over - dismissing them as the work of conspiracy-theorists trying to make a name for themselves.

How on earth could the British media failed to have noticed the intense anger and depth of feeling regarding this case? How could they have been blind to the sheer bloody frustration felt in homes, offices and workplaces the length and breadth of the country?

I will tell you why. Because you and your colleagues only saw what you either wanted to see or were told to see - two Sacred Cows Grazing Upon England's Green and Pleasant Land.

Nice try at damage control - but a case of too damn little, too damn late.