The Times tells us all about the enormous harm done to children when they are moved from foster home to foster home - without ever mentioning the Times-fueled foster-care panic at the root of the problem.
“Nowhere to call home,” says the headline on a big story in the Tampa Bay Times at the end of last year. “Thousands of foster children move so much they risk psychological harm.” The subhead declares that “A Tampa Bay Times investigation finds Florida’s overburdened foster care system repeatedly bounces children from home to home and family to family.”
A Tampa Bay Times investigation? Really? All they had to do was turn on a television and watch the stories on WFLA-TV. The television station broke the story and beat the you-know-what out of the Times on it all through 2018.
The Times catch-up story goes on to describe the terrible toll taken on children by being moved from placement to placement. It does add some data giving a sense of how often it happens in Florida in general and Hillsborough County (metropolitan Tampa) in particular. Any story reminding people of this institutionalized child abuse has value, even one that adds little to what WFLA already told us.
How the Times made the whole problem worse
But the biggest problem with the story is the problem with all of the Tampa Bay Times reporting on child welfare over the past few years. In a state that’s been in the midst of a media-fueled foster-care panic since 2014, and where, by some measures, the panic is worst in the Tampa-St Petersburg area. The Tampa Bay Times has spent years committing journalistic malpractice, helping to fuel the panic by denying the very existence of the problem that drives everything else: needless removal of children.
Read the full post on our Florida blog.
Read the full post on our Florida blog.
