Friday 14 November 2008

Baby P chief at Ascot

I'm not going to get into the in and outs or Harringay's dubious role in this (Lynne Featherstone provides good coverage of this).

One thing got my goat though. Yesterday I was in London, so got the Evening Standard and the front page had a big picture of the Sharon Shoesmith, the head of Childrens' Services at Harringay at Ascot, "Weeks after boy's death she enjoys day at the races".

This was last year. It also [sarcasm]shockingly reveals[/sarcasm] that she "enjoyed a holiday with her own children in New York and Los Angeles"!

This awful journalism makes me so angry! Because of this undoubted tradgedy, the head of the department should cancel all "fun" things and she should definitely not take her children on holiday? I mean "taking her children on holiday", how heartless can one person be? How long should this self-imposed joylessness have lasted? 2 weeks, 6 months, a year?

I somehow expected better from the Standard (I expect you London-dwellers will tell me how that's how foolhardy I am). Also a friend must have given that picture of her to the Standard (it was taken from right next to her and no-one else would know who she is). Either they are very naive or incredibly scummy.

The online equivalent of the article doesn't include the picture.

I'm sure she has things to answer for and may even have to go (but like Gordon Brown, I'm waiting for the report) but it doesn't make that front page right.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree. This is out of hand and it's high time we started saying so.

lizw said...

Thanks for saying this, and thereby saving me the trouble :-)

eeore said...

Yes it was cheap journalism.

But it effectively made the point.

And let's not forget Ms Shoesmith's attempts to paint misleading pictures, for instance by quoting GCSE statistics of children in care at a press conference called to discuss why her department had stood by and watched for 8 months while a child was tortured to death.

It kinda cuts bith ways.

LibCync said...

I wasn't in any way defending her, just merely commenting on that particular aspect. In fact this rubbish obscures the more shocking facts like those that transfattyacid refers to.