Monday, August 20, 2018

The Miami Herald story that amounts to a scathing indictment – of the Miami Herald


As far back as 2011, Miami Herald reporter Carol Marbin Miller was scapegoating efforts to keep families together for child abuse deaths.  The headline on a story that year summed up Miller’s false claim perfectly: “State steps in less and more kids die.”

That also was the claim throughout  Miller’s 2014 series, Innocents Lost. 

After that series was published, the Herald got exactly what it wanted: The state stepped in far more.  The number of children torn from their parents soared.  So problem solved, right?  No more child abuse deaths.  Or at least, now that the state is stepping in more, fewer kids are dying, right?

But that’s not what happened – according to a story in the Miami Herald, by Carol Marbin Miller.

The story, published on August 10, looked back on the tenure of DCF Secretary Mike Carroll, who had announced plans to resign effective September 6.

Carroll took over after the publication of Innocents Lost in 2014  – and he did exactly what the Herald wanted – oversaw the removal of far more children.  But, according to the Herald’s own story, Carroll

…was unable to stem the tide of high-profile calamities, especially the deaths by abuse of vulnerable children,

Missteps by the department often made state and national headlines: a youngster whose father's mental deconstruction was well-known was tossed into Tampa Bay; an adolescent foster child suffering a long-documented emotional collapse hanged herself from a Miami Gardens foster home while livestreaming on Facebook. …

Back when Florida was emphasizing safe, proven approaches to keeping families together, under the leadership of Bob Butterworth and George Sheldon, Florida made a very different kind of national news – as in this assessment from The New York Times. But thanks to the Herald, and Carroll’s willingness to pander to the Herald, all that was wiped out.

And again, the Herald itself says that didn’t work out too well:

When Carroll took the top slot, he stated that any child's death was "unacceptable" and that the department needed to improve.

But under Carroll's tenure, the agency continued to struggle with high-profile child deaths. In 2015, an agency report documented missed opportunities in the case of 5-year-old Phoebe Jonchuck, who was killed after her father dropped her from a St. Petersburg bridge into Tampa Bay.

That same year, Carroll also acknowledged "system failures" in the brutal deaths of two other Tampa Bay-area children. As recently as May, a scathing report faulted several — including agency investigators — in the January scalding death of 1-year-old Ethan Coley of Homestead.

So, now that the state is "stepping in" so much more and, the Herald itself admits, kids are still dying at such a rate that Carroll couldn’t even “stem the tide,” maybe it’s time to finally reconsider why this keeps happening – and stop scapegoating the only approach that ever actually made Florida children safer and Florida child welfare better.

The real reasons children known to the system sometimes die are the same as they always were – caseworkers overloaded with so many false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect, that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.

But don’t take my word for it. Innocents Lost actually said as much – well, sort of. The series cited Alabama as a success story, without telling readers that Alabama created this success by emphasizing family preservation – and taking away children at a far lower rate than Florida. Here, again, The New York Times got the story right.

It is not clear, however, who is going to challenge the Herald, and the way that newspaper has hurt Florida’s most vulnerable children.  It’s unlikely that Carroll’s replacement will be any more willing to stand up to the Herald than Carroll was.

And with all the cutbacks in news gathering, the Herald and the Tampa Bay Times which is, if anything, even more extreme in advocating a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, have a virtual monopoly on child welfare coverage. 

So Florida’s most vulnerable children still have no champion.  And after Mike Carroll’s successor leaves the job, the Herald can write the same story all over again.