Tonight:
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Sarah Montague of the Today programme was much reproved for having asked Shannon Matthews's mother, Karen: "It's a slightly complicated family picture you have, isn't it? You've got seven children, by six fathers?"
To which Matthews merely replied: "Five." Meaning fathers, not children.
Earnest commentators were outraged. They suggested Matthews should have responded angrily or not at all to such an inquiry, with its implication that her choice of lifestyle could have anything to do with the tragic disappearance of her daughter.
In The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting noted that the nasty media loved to scapegoat mothers, such as Kate McCann, Fiona MacKeown, whose daughter was murdered in Goa - and Karen Matthews. She was perceived to have had "too many children and too many partners", said Bunting. "No woman emerges from the public scrutiny unscathed. Let's be clear, the scale of the intolerance is beyond rationality."
It all looks a little different now that Matthews has been charged with perverting the course of justice and child neglect, and three other women in the family arrested, too - as well as Shannon's stepfather, Craig Meehan, arrested for allegedly possessing child pornography, and his uncle, Michael Donovan, charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment.
When Montague popped her simple question, a spokeswoman for a pressure group that campaigns against violence to women protested: "How is that in any sense relevant to what has happened to Shannon?"
Absolutely relevant, of course, we could perhaps now admit. For this whole affair stands revealed as quite a different story from what was first assumed.
And, of course, it followed on too from the Madeleine McCann story. The posters put up in the search for Shannon declared: "We are just like them, though their campaign is rich and to be honest, we haven't got a lot here." Family members approached the McCann campaign for money.
In truth, this story never was about Shannon Matthews herself at all, but everybody else around her, a whole deprived milieu. And the determining fact there is precisely the degraded family structure, despite the flappings of pompous feminist commentators.
While the burdened middle-classes find they can afford only one child or none, the freedom of welfare dependency has helped to create sprawling parodies of families that dishonour parenthood and devastate childhood. That's why the name of Shannon Matthews deserves to be remembered - and the foolish things written about this case should not be forgotten either.
