The Daily Mail is pretty choosy when it comes to deciding which members of the caring professions to support.
Doctors, and especially paediatricians, are revered by the middle England tabloid.
Britain's social workers, on the other hand, find themselves on the wrong end of two (equally negative) conflicting stereotypes. They are either portrayed as woolly-minded incompetents or members of an SS-style militia intent on destroying families' lives.
This confusing approach was in evidence last week as the Mail rushed to the defence of the doctor at the centre of a media storm about the now discredited link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
I was hardly surprised to read the defence of Dr Andrew Wakefield's conduct contained in the newspaper's editorial on Friday morning, which questioned the General Medical Council's judgement that he was "dishonest and irresponsible" in the way he went about his research.
Experts were right to treat his findings seriously, it said.
But I almost spat out my coffee at this killer line: "Is this paper alone in feeling that there has been something of a witch hunt in the determination to crush this man and his colleagues?"
Probably not, but then "this newspaper" knows a thing or two about witch hunts itself.
The Daily Mail added to its trophy cabinet with a special award from Community Care last year for 'worst coverage of social workers' for a string of extremely one-sided reports about an adoption case in Edinburgh, which freely allowed the family to vent their fury against an individual social worker who had worked on the case.
And let's not forget its unpleasant coverage of the Peter Connolly case where the social workers were portrayed as almost as culpable as the child's killers themselves.
Of course, unlike doctors, social workers don't have children's best interests at heart - they only want to split families up.
The Social Work Reform Programme is committed to improving the status and public understanding of social work through raising awareness of the positive contributions made by social work to communities across England.
With biased editorial coverage like this, sounds like they have a way to go.
I was hardly surprised to read the defence of Dr Andrew Wakefield's conduct contained in the newspaper's editorial on Friday morning, which questioned the General Medical Council's judgement that he was "dishonest and irresponsible" in the way he went about his research.
Experts were right to treat his findings seriously, it said.
But I almost spat out my coffee at this killer line: "Is this paper alone in feeling that there has been something of a witch hunt in the determination to crush this man and his colleagues?"
Probably not, but then "this newspaper" knows a thing or two about witch hunts itself.
The Daily Mail added to its trophy cabinet with a special award from Community Care last year for 'worst coverage of social workers' for a string of extremely one-sided reports about an adoption case in Edinburgh, which freely allowed the family to vent their fury against an individual social worker who had worked on the case.
And let's not forget its unpleasant coverage of the Peter Connolly case where the social workers were portrayed as almost as culpable as the child's killers themselves.
Of course, unlike doctors, social workers don't have children's best interests at heart - they only want to split families up.
The Social Work Reform Programme is committed to improving the status and public understanding of social work through raising awareness of the positive contributions made by social work to communities across England.
With biased editorial coverage like this, sounds like they have a way to go.
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