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Paper Monitor

13:08 UK time, Tuesday, 10 March 2009

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

For more than a week now, Paper Monitor has sat and watched passively the flaunting of a certain batch of dirty laundry - believing that each airing must surely be the last, only to be proved wrong on each occasion.

So, while today's Guardian G2 lead feature may look like the last word in the Jake Myerson drugs saga - surely no self-respecting, media-savvy family would wish to publicly tear itself apart any more - Paper Monitor is closing the book on this one while it's still solvent.

For the uninitiated, Julie Myerson and husband Jonathan have occupied a high-up rung on the London media luvvie ladder for some years now. She, a broadsheet columnist-turned-book writer; he, a playwright.

La Myerson used to fill column inches with warm tales of family life (although Paper Monitor does recall a preponderance for the author to stress about gloomy weather) and readers could only presume life was ticking along pretty comfortably - give or take an overcast sky - for all concerned.

But then, the oldest of the children took a teenage wrong turn, got heavily into drugs and things began to go downhill. The world would have remained largely oblivious to this had Julie M not decided to write about her family travails in a new book, and break news of that in last week's Observer.

Since then, browsers of liberal "broadloids" have been witnesses to a sequence of "he said, she said" claims and counter-claims, with Myerson Jr taking umbrage at his outing, and, predictably, a host of commentators from other reaches of the press wading in to have their say.

The whole episode has morphed from a debate about the rights and wrongs of locking your son out of the family home into the ethics of writing about family traumas in the press...

Which is where Jonathan Myerson comes in, with his G2 piece today, and this alarming, albeit self-justifying headline: "There is a glass-fronted box in the corner of every writer's room, protecting the lives of their children: Smash Only In Case Of Emergency. This is an emergency".

And one that could go one for some time yet.

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