Social workers can never win. They are accused of incompetence and complacency if they fail to protect children from abusive or murderous parents and they are described as acting like the Stasi if they remove children from their families.
On Tuesday last week they came under fire again when the Southend Echo reported the case of a couple who had been refused permission to adopt their granddaughter.
The splash treatment was stark, but the text by Christine Sexton was written straight, making clear from the outset that the story was being written based on information from the couple rather than an independent source:

Towards the end of the story there was a quote from the council saying that while it could not comment on individual cases, "we should highlight that age is not the deciding factor in our assessments of prospective carers" .

The Mail picked up on the story and splashed with it the next day. In its eyes there was no doubt why the grandparents' application had been refused:

The report went on to say that the couple's daughter had been "persuaded" to sign a form giving up the child while she was in a mental health hospital and without legal advice. It continued  that the grandparents had attended a court hearing on June 17, but that they had been "unable to argue their case as they could not afford legal representation". Their case had now been taken up by a solicitor who had waived her fees.
The Mail also quoted the council spokeswoman saying that age was not the deciding factor.

Both papers followed up the story on Thursday. In the Mail, Steve Baker, a Tory MP who sat on a Commons working group on fostering and adoption in the last Parliament, and John Hemming, a former Liberal Demcrat MP who runs the Justice for Families campaign group, both questioned the mother's capacity to consent to her daughter being put into care. A second Tory MP offered an anodyne comment about the child's welfare being paramount and preconceptions about age.

The Echo produced a spread in which the grandmother said that she had been told that another reason she had not been allowed to adopt the child was that she had suffered post-natal depression 31 years earlier. That story then went over the ground of the original piece, and was bolstered with a case study of another couple aged 62 and 70 who had fostered hundreds of children.
The council clearly felt aggrieved by the media interest because that afternoon it tweeted a link to an edited version of the judgment issued on June 17, which had just been published by the family court in Chelmsford.

In his adjudication, district judge Stephen Hodges, left, describes how the mother had, since adolescence, suffered from depression, self-harming, a personality disorder and a neurological problem that tended to lead to epilepsy. In January this year she had cut herself with a kitchen knife in front of the child and was subsequently sectioned.
The child then spent three days with the grandparents before being moved into foster care because the mother objected to her being with her parents. The little girl had been in foster care ever since. Her mother had been discharged from hospital, but was readmitted in May and had accepted that she could not care for her daughter. They had a "goodbye" meeting on June 5 and the mother had expected a final care order to be made at the June 17 hearing - which she did not attend.
According to the judgment, the grandparents had chosen that hearing to make their application to care for the child - even though they had been in possession of the social services' assessment of their unsuitability since March -  and they refused the judge's offer of an adjournment to allow them to prepare formal statements. They had no legal representation, but told him that they wanted the matter dealt with that day and the grandfather gave evidence under oath. 
In that evidence, he said that they had previously been asked to care for the child, but they had not done so because his wife was ill and his daughter did not want the little girl to go to them. He spoke of conflicts between his wife and daughter, the difficulty in keeping the peace at home, and how his wife's problems with their daughter brought on her depression. He had been to many meetings in relation to his daughter as she grew up, but that his wife had not attended because of her depression.
The social worker's assessment said that the mother had had an unhappy and dysfunctional childhood and the judge noted that she had on various occasions said that she was abused physically by her parents. He concluded:

The judgment includes two quotes from the viability assessment, neither of which refers to the grandparents' age, but the judge says "this is not a short document", so it is perfectly possible - likely even - that it does include concerns that at 82, the grandfather might have difficulty dealing with a teenager.
The impression conveyed by the edited judgment released to the public is of a woman in her early 30s who has had a troubled childhood - the viability assessment refers to "extensive professional involvement" - and who is not now able to look after the daughter she loves. She has said goodbye to the child - a scene the judge said she described in "heartrending" terms - and wants her to live with a stable "forever" family rather than her own parents.

The Echo responded to the release of the ruling by publishing it in full. The Mail responded like a cat that misjudges a manoeuvre: hope no one notices and walk on, nose in the air, as though nothing has happened. There has been nothing in the paper on this case since Thursday.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, pitched in on Saturday with a page lead headlined Full story of grandparents 'too old to adopt'.

Except it isn't.
The judgment in this case was delivered in private and its release to the public two days after the case hit the newspapers cannot be coincidence.
The grandparents' case seems hopeless when you read the ruling, yet there was enough in it for a solicitor to come forward and offer to represent them without payment. And the point the MPs picked up on - that the mother signed away her rights to her daughter while being treated in a mental health unit and without an legal representation - remains unanswered.
The Mail's first story notes that the social workers' assessment of the grandparents is not available to the public - quite rightly so - but the judge says the couple had been in possession of a copy since March 24. Why didn't Christine Sexton of the Echo or Andrew Levy and Rosie Taylor of the Mail ask to see it? And if they did, and were denied access to the document that supposedly corroborated the grandparents' claim about ageism, then shouldn't they have smelt a rat? They should certainly not have taken the couple's story at face value.
There is little doubt from all the material available that both mother and grandparents love the little girl at the centre of this case.  What we don't know is whether the decisions made along the way will make it more or less likely that she will live happily ever after.
It is seven years now since Camilla Cavendish started writing in The Times about the need for greater openness from family courts - a campaign that earned her the Paul Foot award and led to some changes in the privacy rules. Yet we still cannot be sure that families are seeing justice.
The only reason this case from Shoeburyness reached the public consciousness was because someone mentioned age. That turns out to have been a side issue, and we shall probably never know the full story. That may be right and proper, a family's private traumas should not be aired for public entertainment. 
But if women are being coerced into signing away the right to look after their children when they are not mentally fit, in order that councils can meet adoption targets - as the grandparents' lawyer and MPs suggest,- then we need to know.
The journalists covering this story have fallen for the clickbait angle and missed the real issue.

We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can, and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

These were the promises made to Sun staff arrested for paying public officials for stories. The first came from Rupert Murdoch himself, secretly taped during a meeting with his journalists in March 2013. The second in an email from News UK chief executive Mike Darcey last year when crime reporter Anthony France was told he must face trial.

So what happened?
Most of the journalists were cleared - or at least not convicted - and the Crown Prosecution Service retreated from most of the outstanding cases, leaving former head of news Chris Pharo and reporter Jamie Pyatt alone in facing a retrial on a single count after a jury could not reach a verdict.
But one conviction stands - that of Anthony France, who was given a suspended prison sentence by a judge who described him as a decent man of solid integrity. 
Judge Pontius made an order that France should pay £34,618 towards the prosecution costs - on the understanding that News UK would foot the bill.
Six weeks later France was back in court to hear his lawyer tell the judge that the company would not pay - and not only that, it was also considering disciplinary proceedings against him.
The judge was not pleased. Sun journalists routinely paid for stories, France had "inherited" his police contact, and the company had funded his defence "at considerable expense":

The judge reduced the order to £3,461 and a crowd-funding appeal raised the money within six hours.
But why did News UK refuse to cough up?
In that, it was being consistent. It did not pay Nick Parker's costs after his conviction for handling a mobile phone and it has said that it will not contribute to the hacking trial prosecution costs - Mr Justice Saunders made orders of £150,000 against Andy Coulson and £75,000 against Ian Edmondson last week.
There is a difference, though, between phone hacking - which everyone accepts was wrong - and paying contacts for stories, which has proved more of a grey area.
In that covert tape from 2013, later released by Exaro, Murdoch tells the staff:arrested under Elveden that he didn't know of anyone who had done anything "that wasn't being done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture...Payments for news tips from cops, that's been going on for a hundred years". 
Rebekah Brooks had previously told a Commons select committee that her papers had paid police for information, and several respected journalists piped up with anecdotes confirming that such payments had been common practice. Rival news organisations joined the condemnation of the Operation Elveden prosecutions and the celebration of acquittals.

There is obviously more to this than money: the hacking scandal and its fallout have cost News Corp hundreds of millions of dollars, a few thousand more here or there wouldn't make a lot of difference to the business or to shareholders. So why hang out junior staff to dry?
The clue probably lies in the pauses in that Murdoch tape from two years ago; the hesitation when confronted with the question: what if we're convicted?

He has already told the gathering that anyone who was released or acquitted "would just continue", but in the event of a conviction "I've been told that I must not give guarantees, but I can give you something.". 
Graham Dudman, the former managing editor who went on to be cleared of some charges and to have others against him dropped, pushes the point:
"Will News International be allowed to make a decision on whether somebody is retained in employment with the company or will that be taken by people in New York?"
Darcey, who has been asked this question in previous meetings, interjects: "We don't know what you mean by 'people in New York'. Were you specifically referring to the MSC?"
[The MSC was the Managements and Standards Committee set up in the panic after the Milly Dowler story broke, which went on to hand over millions of documents to the police, and which in turn prompted the broadening of the initial hacking investigation into payments to public officials.]
Dudman comes back: "The MSC or a News Corp lawyer who says 'No, Rupert, you can't do that. You've got to do this."
Murdoch assures him: "We all take legal advice. I'll take that decision. I'll take responsibility. Absolutely."
Pressed further by Dudman: "So you, as chairman, would be prepared to go against legal advice if you felt that was appropriate?", Murdoch replies: "Sure."

The question now is what advice Murdoch is getting in New York and whether he feels it is appropriate.
For, as he admitted himself, the whole MSC and its messy aftermath was the product of panic, a frantic attempt to protect the business - a business run from New York. And whatever Murdoch's protestations, there remains a
near-universal belief that fear of corporate governance and malpractice litigation in the US has driven every News Corp move over the past four years. To appear to condone law-breaking, whether by paying prosecution costs or by keeping a convicted journalist on the staff, is fraught.
One insider told SubScribe: 

Then there is Murdoch's anti-establishment cussedness: he will not have taken kindly to the suggestion that his organisation should reimburse the Exchequer for the prosecution of his staff - especially when he believes, as he says, that they have been "picked on" in retribution for Sun activities over the past forty years.
We may yet see further examples of that obduracy. 

The flurry of acquittals and the capitulation of the CPS may have been a cause for celebration, but they have brought a new set of problems: what to do with the journalists who are now free to resume their careers? You can't run a news organisation for two or three years without deputy editors, managing editors, news editors, picture editors, reporters. Others have stepped up to cover for the Elveden crew who have been catching up on their reading while suspended from work and on bail. And while Murdoch may have said that anyone acquitted would "naturally just continue", he probably wasn't expecting the process to drag on for a further two years.
So negotiations are underway at London Bridge. Older hands are looking for what are delightfully known as exit packages, younger journos with young families and big mortgages are looking to return, and those in the middle are trying to decide which way to jump.
Overlooking all of this is one Rebekah Brooks. Although she holds no official position, she remains close to Murdoch and is seen constantly at his side when he's in town. And while the lawyers are calling the shots in the negotiations, those who have met her have come away with the feeling that she has had some influence over the terms being offered.

What goes around comes around. 
Four years ago Murdoch had to abandon his bid to take over the bit of BSkyB that he didn't own because of the hacking fallout. The company has since expanded into Europe and is now called simply Sky, the name Murdoch first gave it in 1984, long before the merger with British Satellite Broadcasting. In the past month, 21st Century Fox (which took control of the network when News Corp was split) has rebuffed approaches from Vodafone and Vivendi for its 39% share of the business, saying it wanted £18 per share - it is currently trading at around £11.31. 
With a majority Tory government now in place, some analysts are predicting that Fox may be planning a fresh bid to take outright control.
The man who would ostensibly be in charge of any such bid would be the Fox chief executive: James Murdoch, former chief executive of BSkyB and - during its darkest days - of News International. 
James took the helm at Wapping in 2011 when Rebekah Brooks resigned. Her£16m payoff is reported to have included a clause promising her a job of equal status should she be cleared of any criminal charges - which indeed she was.
So there she is now, in her upper floor office in the Baby Shard with no formal title. Mike Darcey is understood to be leaving the company in the autumn and, despite initial disbelief, there is a widespread expectation that Brooks will get her old job back.
As one observer noted: "It would be such a Rupert thing to do - rubbing his enemies' noses in it."
Which doesn't help Anthony France as he knuckles down to his next 100 hours of community service.

We remember James Foley, but what about Faisal al-Habib? 
We know who Peter Greste is, but does the name Mahmoud Abou Zeid ring a bell?
Al-Habib was, like Foley, a journalist. And, like Foley, he was murdered by Isis. Like Foley, he met his end dressed in a symbolic orange prisoner's jumpsuit, the "star" of a snuff propaganda video. Although in his case he was shot rather than beheaded.
Al-Habib, 21, had been abducted in Raqqa in Syria and accused, alongside fellow media activist Bahsar Abdul Atheem, 20, of photographing oil wells and distributing anti-Sharia leaflets. After confessing on video, the two were tied to a tree and shot in the head.
The murders last week received little attention in the Isis-obsessed British media. 
Even the "trial" and "execution" of a woman journalist in Iraq did not cause a stir. Suha Ahmed Radi had been a reporter on a Mosul newspaper until Isis overran the city last year. She then switched to offering stories to news agencies. The move cost her her life. Isis broke into her home, then held her captive for several days before sentencing her to death for espionage and spreading false propaganda.
The Iraqi Journalists Syndicate believes that at least 14 journalists have been murdered by Isis in Mosul since it took control there last June.  Known victims this year include the photographer Adnan Abdul Razzaq, the newspaper editor Thaer al-Ali, and television producer Feras Yasin. 
Our newspapers and broadcasters cannot, of course, be expected to record every journalistic death, so it comes as a shock even to those of us within the industry when the figures are collated, as they have been by the International News Safety Institute in conjunction with the Cardiff School of Journalism. INSI's twice-yearly survey Killing the Messenger has just been released, and very sobering it is, too. It reports that 60 journalists and support workers were killed in the first six months of this year. 
Some of these deaths received huge attention - the Charlie Hebdo massacre that resulted in France becoming statistically the most dangerous environment for journalists - and the Isis murder of the Japanese freelance Kenji Goto. But when you look at the INSI website - and, indeed, that of the Committee to Protect Journalists - it is doubly shocking to note how little is known about so many of the non-Western victims and how little is done to chase down their killers. 
Richard Sambrook, professor of journalism at Cardiff and chairman of INSI, said: “So far this year seven journalists have been decapitated by jihadist groups - a figure unthinkable a few years ago. The consequence of all this is that the public know less about the world than they should, and the killing of journalists is increasingly seen as a political act or means of censorship.” 
Sambrook also noted that almost all of those killed had been working locally, and many had been trying to expose crime and corruption. 
Across three continents, the modus operandi is remarkably similar: one or two men on a motorbike zoom in and fire a few shots as their target is leaving home, arriving at the office or just waiting at a bus stop. This is international summary "justice" for challenging a politician or crossing a criminal, proof that journalists are not endangered only when working in warzones.
The very high percentage (90%) of deaths in supposedly peaceful areas is - as with the suggestion that France is a riskier environment than Yemen - a slightly skewed statistic. For it is in part a reflection of the fact that  many mainstream organisations have pulled out of Syria and Libya because the risk to their staffs has become unacceptable
With the rise of Isis, the West contemplating (and, indeed, taking) military action in the area,  and concerns about the masses of people trying to escape from the region to Europe, this is a real problem. We need a much clearer picture from trusted correspondents to inform public opinion about the wisdom or otherwise of decisions being taken in Westminster, Washington and Brussels.

Kenji Goto was murdered on the same weekend that Peter Greste suddenly found himself being taken out of a prison in Cairo and on to a plane home to Brisbane. 
Greste had been in custody for 400 days, most of them before his conviction last summer for helping a terrorist organisation - as the Muslim Brotherhood has now been branded. 
His arrest, along with his Al Jazeera English bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and colleague Baher Mohamed, led to an international campaign under the hashtag "Journalism is not a crime", which saw journalists and media presenters all over the world posing with their mouths taped shut. The focus was on the "AJ three", but other colleagues and students were also in prison. One, in jail without charge, was eventually released after a prolonged hunger strike. 
Hopes for justice were not high, especially with judges dispensing death sentences to hundreds of people at a time after ten-minute mass trials. Greste, Fahmy and Mohamed were each jailed for seven years, and Mohamed was given a further three for possessing a bullet. The convictions were quashed in January, Greste was deported and the other two have spent the past two months being retried, with the verdict due on July 30.
In all this, SubScribe is probably telling you what you already know. What you may not know, however, is how many other journalists have been imprisoned in Egypt since the overthrow of President Morsi and the outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood. 
The incoming President al-Sisi promised greater Press freedom, but a survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists  last month found that 18 journalists were in jail in Egypt for allegedly "anti-state" activities. Mahmoud Abou Zeid, whom I mentioned at the start of this post, has been in prison without charge for two years.
The CPJ has protested to Egypt about the situation and is also spearheading a campaign called Press Uncuffed to try to secure the release of eight other journalists imprisoned around the world.
Then there are the journalists being held hostage - no one knows exactly how many, but they certainly number in dozens. Among them is Britain's John Cantlie,  still in the clutches of Isis and being used as a propaganda pawn, who has told his family to forget him and move on. The whereabouts of the American Austin Tice are still unknown.  it's all pretty grim.
Most of us don't face these sorts of dangers doing our jobs, and public sympathy for all journalists has been in short supply since the hacking scandal. Few tears have been shed beyond Fleet Street for those News UK journalists who spent years in limbo in our justice system before being cleared of criminally paying for stories.
It's perhaps wise, therefore, to avoid over-empathising for fear that that could amount to self-aggrandisement. But ours is an honourable and important trade and we should be proud to stand up for it

Yet in all this, there is a glimmer of hope. The graphics and collation for INSI were done at the Cardiff journalism school. The Press Uncuffed campaign was started by students at the University of Maryland's college of journalism. It's good to know that the next generation is being driven by something other than celebrity gossip.
The Maryland students have also produced bracelets to support the imprisoned journalists, which you can buy here. And the family of Austin Tice has a campaign page that you can support here.
You see, we're not all bad.

You can see brief reports about those killed while doing their jobs this year, death notices for some distinguished journalists and links to commentaries about the reporting of other deaths on the revamped Obituary page here

For reports of the court hearings, click here and here.
Peter Greste background
Abdullah Elshamy released
Commentary: Why we should care about jailed journalists