BREAKING NEWS: YOU TOO CAN BUY A $10,000 WATCH

Also...the horrific murder of 8-year-old Sofia Mason may have been preventable.

Sunday morning is the time for the Mercury News to showcase its finest work before the most Bay Area eyeballs. What headline greeted me this morning?

Um…so the news today seems to be that I can schedule an appointment at my local mall to buy a $10,000 watch from IWC. Oh, wait. That’s an advertisement. A full front page advertisement. They’ve done 3/4 page ads before, but a full page splash that covers the headline completely is unusual. What is today’s top headline, actully?

The Mercury News has taken up the cause of Sofia Mason, an 8-year-old girl found murdered and decomposed in a locked bathroom in Merced county; Sofia’s mother and her pimp/boyfriend have since been arrested and charged with her murder. The Mercury News wrote this article, presumably, to give us a deeper look into the numerous complaints of physical abuse lodged with Alameda County’s Department of Social Services (some by Sofia’s family, some by doctors) that went nowhere, leaving Sofia in the care of people who killed her. The blame, according to the Merc, lies squarely at the feet of Alameda County social workers.

“I don’t think that social workers are all intrinsically evil,” claims attorney Carly Sanchez in what I am sure was intended as a magnanimous concession to the field of social work. “But what we’ve heard over and over again in some of our other cases is they’re overworked, the cases are overwhelming to them, and they’re choosing the path of least resistance.”

So the problem, we are left to believe, is that these social workers are choosing paths of least resistance. Limited resources and case-files-full-of-nightmares may have been factors, but the blame lies with the poor choices that social workers made for the sake of ease or convenience.

The reader might take the Merc’s moralizing a little more seriously if the newspaper had not prefaced its investigative journalism with a full page ad to induce a dozen-or-so people to buy $10,000 watches. Social workers have plenty of resources! But first, here’s an ad for a watch that costs 1/5th of a social worker’s salary! Now that we’ve heard from our sponsor, let’s clutch our pearls.

Before the reader finally arrives at the story, we are met with a stylized “photo illustration” of Sofia Mason. On one of the few occasions that the Merc put a picture of a young, female, African-American murder victim above the fold, it then subjects her to “photo illustration.” The original photo, which may have been a school picture from the days when Sofia was happy and healthy in her grandmother’s care, is over-pixilated to the point of pointilism. The edges of the photo fade and splatter as though it had come straight from a manila folder on the desk of a hardened, chain-smoking film detective. Excerpts from Sofia’s case file are made to look as though they were typed on ripped post-it notes (to be fair, some of the most important notes in Sofia’s case file may well have been scrawled on ripped post-it notes). If we are being urged to remember the poor girl who slipped through every crack in the Bay Area’s social safety net, she deserves the dignity to be remembered with an unedited photo of when she was happy in her grandma’s care, not a lurid collage buried under an ad for a $10,000 watch.

The Merc doubtlessly believes that it is championing this little girl’s cause, and no family should endure the string of horrors that lead up to her death. But reading about Sofia’s story in the Merc makes me feel as though I’ve been sold easy outrage and expensive timepieces.