ABSTRACT
Bad news about social work, far from spotlighting every seeming failure of every type of agency with every client group in every media outlet is, in reality, highly discriminating. Its epicentre is policy failures and practice errors in local authority social services. Even these are covered very selectively, only getting into the national press when the issue has aspects which tie to the wider news agendas of particular newspapers. For local papers the threshold of relevance is far lower, but the standing of the department as authoritative source accordingly higher.
