From the story we learned that ‘a desperate young mother frantically tried to revive her baby daughter after finding the infant floating face down in the bath next to her twin sister.’

But the mother’s efforts were unsuccessful and the baby later died in Starship Hospital. The story continued:

‘Police are investigating the death but say it’s too early to know if charges will be laid…. It is understood the mother briefly left her daughters in the bath while she went to get something ready for them.

‘”It was just a matter of minutes,” Detective Michelle Shepherd, of the Waitakere child abuse team, said. “She immediately scooped her out of the bath. She phoned the ambulance who talked her through doing CPR.”‘

The remainder of the story highlighted the dangers of leaving small children unattended in the bath.

The story was back on the front page again this morning:

Mother of bath tragedy child on CYF list

In this story we learn that the baby’s 21-year-old mother,  whom the Herald names,  ’was regularly visited by Child Youth and Family which gave her advice on how to provide a “safe and loving home” for her twin daughters.

‘While police continue to investigate the case [her twin sister] has been placed in another home. Police say it may be some time before a decision is made on whether any charges will be laid.

‘CYF general manager operations John Henderson last night described [the baby's] death as a tragedy.’

Herald reporter, Elizabeth Binning, was meanwhile doing what reporters do – looking for  background and colour. She quoted from the family’s death notice in the paper,  got another quote from the little girl’s grandmother, who said the death was ‘just terrible’. And then this:

‘The Herald has been unable to contact [the girl's mother], but a picture on her page on the social networking site Bebo shows two baby girls, wrapped in blankets, lying on a couch side by side.’

Let’s all rush to our computers!

I wondered what the justification for these two front page stories was. The Herald would no doubt argue that they provided a salutary warning against leaving small children unattended in the bath. No doubt they do.

But the stories went beyond that, in my submission,  to exploit this mother’s and this family’s personal tragedy for no better reason than to sell newspapers. In so doing, it behaved no differently from any other newspaper in the country or, for that matter, any other media outlet.

When we read this stuff, we become little different from rubberneckers at a fatal accident, ghouls getting our jollies from the personal tragedies of our fellow man and woman, then taking the moral high ground of blame.

Twin dies after being left for ‘just minutes’. Do those quotation marks perhaps invite us to wonder whether it was really ‘just minutes’? And since police are quoted in both stories as saying that no decision has been made to prosecute the mother, why mention that possibility at all? Because a bad mother makes much better copy than an inadequate mother, whose entire history testifies to her inability to cope.

It is hard to imagine the mental agony that the mother of this little girl must have suffered when she found her baby nearly drowned in the bath, when her attempts at CPR failed, when the ambulance paramedics could do little better, when the life support system at Starship Hospital was turned off. And within 48 hours of her daughter’s death her story is front page news in the country’s biggest metropolitan newspaper, and front page again 24 hours later. And, in the interests of news and under the guise of sympathy and public information, she is named and shamed. Is there no humanity in our newsrooms? Very little.

If you doubt it, consider the extraordinary fact that the Herald tried unsuccessfully to contact the mother, for no other purpose I can imagine, than to interview her or get a statement. This in the period between her baby’s  tragic death and a service this afternoon to ‘farewell’ the little girl. I find this unconscionable. What, in god’s name, do you ask a woman whose baby has drowned in the bath and who undoubtedly blames herself for the tragedy? ‘What happened?’ ‘What had you gone to get for the twins?’ ‘How did you feel when you saw your baby face down in the water?’ ‘Do you have a message for other parents?’

From time to time I find myself referred to as a ‘journalist’. On the whole I’m more comfortable with being called a ‘spin doctor’.