I am not proud, either, with how the media conducted themselves in the agonizing days and weeks after Tori went missing, when the full weight of disapproval was heaped on the child’s poor mother, Tara McDonald, judging her mannerisms, her parenting, her choices in men, her “one o’clocks’’ — the daily press conferences outside their Woodstock home, intended to keep Tori’s vanishing at the forefront of news cycles that — and, in some quarters, essentially pronounced responsible, even guilty, of somehow doing away with her own daughter.
We can be jackals. And those who condemned McDonald were dreadfully wrong. She is owed an apology, from journalists and skeptical police who added to her misery.
