Allegations of sexual abuse against a child are serious, deeply sensitive matters. Not, perhaps, the sort of thing you'd like to announce via a top-rated TV talk show.
But that is just what the parents of Shawn Hornbeck, the US boy recently reunited with his family after being abducted four years earlier, did on the Oprah Winfrey programme last week.
"OK, I'm gonna go there and ask you, what do you think happened? Do you think he was sexually abused?", Oprah asked the boy's parents, Craig and Pam Akers. They nodded and said "yes".
The talk show host was, thankfully, a bit more tactful when she interviewed Shawn himself earlier, away from the studio. Shawn revealed he "never wanted any kid to go through what I went through" but was allowed to leave it at that.
One midwest woman blogging under the name A Better Mousetrap expressed her discomfort in a post titled "When a child disappears...and shows up on Oprah":
"I was immediately disappointed that Shawn's parents revealed on national television that they believe he was sexually molested. Yes, we all suspected it. Hell, most of us would have bet money on it. But it ultimately is his decision to reveal it. I thought they were wrong to do that."
A male US blogger, the cryptically named Scootmandubious, was more scathing:
"What on earth was the point of that exchange? For whose edification was it done? The titillation of the viewers? Did anybody consider what that boy must be feeling to have that media molestation forced upon him? The answer is that this boy was the last person anybody considered."
Others have also faced criticism for their role in the media frenzy surrounding Shawn, among them rightwing talk show host Bill O'Reilly, who suggested that the main reason the boy never ran away from his alleged kidnapper, despite plenty of opportunity, was "there was an element here that this kid liked about this circumstances".
This brought down the full force of political super-site the Huffington Post, columnist Steve Young noting acidly:
"Bill O'Reilly.. decided this week that he would take it upon himself to attack the most vulnerable of victims. A child who had been terrorised and quite possibly emotionally and sexually abused by an adult kidnapper for four years"
But someone else has been getting even more of a pasting - TV psychic Sylvia Browne , a regular on US talks shows such as Montel Williams and Larry King.
As a series of gleeful reports have recounted, Ms Browne told Shawn's parents shortly after his disappearance that their son was "no longer with us" and his body was in a "wooded area" not far from their home.
The opprobium heaped on the psychic has not been helped by claims - which Ms Browne rejects - that she offered to help find the body if a suitable fee was paid.
"I think it's just cruel to jump on this one case in which I was wrong," the psychic said said in her defence. "I've said thousands of times I'm not God."
The perhaps self-explanatory Skeptico blog was unforgiving:
"I don't think anyone expects her to be God. I would, however, expect her to be able to tell the difference between dead and alive... Really, what is the point of asking a psychic if she can't even get that right? And what did she give us - the body would be found "in a wooded area" - that's about as generic as it gets. All that was missing was "near water" - another old standby of the pretend psychic."
