This was a case where the mainstream press mangled the basic facts about a vulnerable child and the temporary foster parents who were looking after her into a inflammatory, sectarian fairy story as fake as anything the Breitbart propaganda organ's autofellator-in-chief could have made up.
Tom lists the ten most outrageous lies, along with the real facts of the case as we know them, and thinks that the journalists responsible have been so malicious and/or incompetent that they clearly deserve to be sacked.
I wouldn't be sorry to see the backs of the hacks in question, either, but I'm also sceptical about the idea that chronic misinformation from the press is a problem that can be solved by chucking out a few bad apples.
As far as I can see, the problem isn't just bad hacks beating proper journalists in a straight fight for possession of a level playing field. The problem is a news ecosystem where sensational lies can quickly bloom and flourish, crowding out the slower growth of conscientious, fact-checked journalism.
While sacking spectacularly bad journos might feel good in the short term, only a system that supports journalists in general will allow producers of good-quality information to flourish. And at the moment, it sounds ridiculously hard to flourish as a good journalist.
The horrible examples here* are from the USA, but they're quite consistent with what I've been reading about the state of UK journalism for years (ever since Flat Earth News).
A chronically insecure profession, which denies professionals the time and resources to do a good job is a bad place to be, if you're conscientious, curious and questioning.
It's probably a better place to be if you're an over-confident compulsive bullshitter, happy to obediently fill blank spaces with a generic infotainment product, mindlessly reflecting your employers' brand values, without unprofitably wasting too much the day checking out those messy, time-consuming and frequently off-message things called facts.
You can see how such an insecure, pressured environment might favour groupthink, corner-cutting and reflexive deference to unreasonable authority, while selecting against the slower processes of analytic thinking, fact-checking and questioning received opinion, which are the basis of what any reasonable person would call good journalism.
That's bad enough in itself, but the effect is amplified by the encroachment of an invasive species into the news ecosystem - the Greater Public Relations Weasel.
As Roy Greenslade, pointed out last year, the 64,000 people working as journalists in the UK are now outnumbered by the 84,000 people working in public relations. And we know that a lot of what journalists do isn't objective, factual reporting of what the journalists themselves think is important, but mere recycling of press releases and infomercials from a members of a larger, well-funded profession which has no claim to objectivity, or to any value more public-spirited than burnishing the image of its clients.
The effect is further amplified when the the lies made up by bad journalists, or mindlessly copy n' pasted from press releases are propagated by public service broadcasters. The BBC doesn't just do its own journalism in a vacuum, but reflects back the news agenda spawned in the incestouous hothouse of sloppy, journalism and public relations spin.
As an example, take Radio 4's flagship morning news programme, Today. On weekdays, it kicks off its broadcast at 6.00am sharp, with a rundown of its own headline stories (one, or more, of which will frequently have started life as a story from elsewhere in the mainstream press), followed by a weather report, then a round up of what the British newspapers have decided to put on their front pages that day.
In this way, poisonous nonsense like the "Christian child forced into Muslim foster care" scare headline, complete with sensational details about a crucifix being forcibly removed and the child being told to learn Arabic are laundered into the national discourse, via the supposedly respectable, fact-based BBC ("We're only reporting what other people are saying").
Wake up to our unbiased national broadcaster and the day's newly-minted lies can be churning round your brain before you've gulped down your coffee and breakfast cereal.
Of course, people can try to refute provable untruths, but thanks to the backfire effect, this may only succeed in hammering home the original lies more firmly.
And there's an even more insidious feedback loop going on. The act of fact-checking bad journalism has created the idea that fake news comes from the mainstream media (which it sometimes does). So now, notoriously shameless liars like Trump, Johnson and Farage can bellow "You're fake news!" in the face of any journalist who dares to hold them to account, or sneeringly dismiss easily verified facts as "project fear." It might sound ridiculous coming from people like that, but when they play on distrust of the mainstream media, the partisan, slipshod mainstream media really do bear some of the blame.
And the feedback loop gets loopier still. When more reasonable, non-fanatical people hear blustering Trumpist ninnies raging about how they're being unfairly misrepresented by the crooked, dishonest mainstream media, their natural reaction is to categorise anyone who points out media bias as a blithering loon who can safely be ignored for ever.
And if such media sceptics are ignored, the mainstream meda can continue to churn out the sort of inaccurate, vindictive rubbish that helped create the low-trust environment which spawned the whole Trumpist brand of post-truth politics in the first place...
It was just one story, about one little girl who's had a tough life, but the way it's been distorted and weaponised shines a light on a whole bunch of stuff that touches every one of us, from which voices get heard, and which are suppressed, or misrepresented, to the hollowing out of respected professions and their replacement by toxic bullshit jobs, to the awful politics that we get when mere facts can be drowned out by whoever has the loudest foghorn, to the question of who, ultimately, benefits from the seemingly exponential growth in mistrust, insecurity and chaos.
*via
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