A woman has been charged and is awaiting trial, yet the papers carry on monstering her. The government could call a halt in the interest of justice, but it would rather not
If by chance you have been reading the popular papers in recent days - in particular the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, the Sun and the Sunday Express - then you will have seen some astonishing stories about Karen Matthews, the mother of Shannon.
These stories are, of course, unproven, in any legal sense. Some were attributed to named sources, notably to men said to be former partners of hers, but others were pinned on the usual vague and anonymous "friends" and "neighbours" around the Dewsbury area. None of the stories was remotely flattering, and some laid grave and lurid charges at her door.
As the Victorian lady is said to have remarked of Shakespeare's Cleopatra: "How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen."
But if the Matthews story is extraordinary, it is so partly because of what it says about our newspapers, the government and the law, for many of the gravest of the allegations against Matthews appeared in print after she had been charged with child neglect and perverting the course of justice.
Isn't there supposed to be a law against that? Many people think there is: we have a relatively recent (1981) Contempt of Court Act, designed to help ensure that defendants can have fair trials by preventing the publication of stories which might prejudice potential members of future juries.
The act is short and to the point. It comes into play very early, at the moment where a warrant for arrest is issued, and it makes journalists and news organisations liable to fines or imprisonment if they create "a substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced".
That test - a substantial risk of serious prejudice - is a demanding one. It ensures on the one hand that reporters and editors are not hauled into court for trivial stories, while on the other hand it should help identify the point at which a real problem has arisen. Decisions to prosecute are made by the Attorney General, at present Baroness Scotland.
In the case of Karen Matthews, we are looking at a woman who has been charged, and about whom national newspapers have since made allegations which are (it is difficult to summarise without becoming a party to the case, and I had better not do that) grotesque and shocking. Millions of people have read those allegations and it is a racing certainty that among them are several members of the jury that will try Matthews.
Does this constitute substantial risk of serious prejudice? For me at least, it is hard to see how it could not. I asked the Attorney General's office if it was planning any action and was told that it did not usually confirm or deny such things, but I will be very surprised if anything happens.
On recent form, the chances of Baroness Scotland taking action against the News of the World and the other papers over this case is so small as to be negligible, because if she is anything like her predecessor she is simply looking the other way. Lord Goldsmith rivalled the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger in his ability not to see what was right in front of him: in his time there were half a dozen important cases, including the coverage of the five Ipswich murders, where the papers pushed their luck to the point that even some of the journalists involved could hardly believe they were getting away with it.
If ministers had concluded that the law was out of date this might just be understandable, but there is precious little evidence of that. It is far more likely that the act is being allowed to wither for no better reason than a reluctance to take on the mass-circulation press - the same reluctance we saw a fortnight ago when the government abandoned plans to introduce meaningful penalties for stealing confidential data.
The British Newseum
Washington has a new, $450m (£230m) museum called the Newseum, dedicated to, of all things, journalism, and Jack Shafer, media columnist of the online magazine Slate, has been waging a delightful war on it.
Shafer calls it a "gilded disaster" and mocks such highlights of the displays as the news helicopter, the hotel door from the Watergate break-in and the spectacles of a reporter killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Shafer is surely wrong. It's a great idea, so good an idea, in fact, that we need the same sort of museum over here, and the sooner we start collecting the artefacts the better.
Get me, before they are lost to posterity, John Simpson's burqa, Jeremy Clarkson's 70mph mobile phone, a Richard Littlejohn payslip, Hunter Davies's remote control, Jeremy Paxman's underpants, a tie from Jon Snow, Simon Heffer's quill pen, David Mellor's Chelsea strip, Kate Adie's flak jacket and Alastair Campbell's moral compass. Oh, it's going to be simply fascinating.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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