Passive in ways that I've never seen a healthy child in real life, children in the media are the ultimate exploited group, the strangely silent receptacles for whatever emotions it suits the grown-up world to pour into them.
This sort of exploitation, which could be termed a colonialisation of the image of children, is so taken for granted that it is scarcely explored, even in a forum allegedly provided for deconstructing media imagery.
Take The Image Of Rosita, last weekend's Omnibus (BBC World Service), which looked at the argument over the meanings of one extraordinary video, the pictures last year of Rosita, a tiny baby, being rescued by helicopter from a treetop in a flooded area of Mozambique.
It was a conversation of the sort the World Service is so well positioned to transmit: an exchange between the First and Third Worlds about the way the former imag(in)es - to borrow from academia - the latter. (Plus the way the latter lacks the resources to imag(in)e itself, and indeed to keep its babies from being born in treetops.)
Good points were made about the stereotyped image of airborne white South Africans rescuing black Africans from trees, and about how this underlining of stereotypes contributed to the global popularity of the image. In a programme full of journalists and their peculiar form of pop philosophy, however, it didn't get much further than that.
It was useful to hear, though, that Mozambican navy boats saved far more people than did helicopters. It was horrible to hear from a journalist who was on the scene that the aircraft - rescue choppers, media choppers - almost certainly blew people out of neighbouring trees while they were rescuing the likes of Rosita.
It's My Story: Different For A Reason (BBC Radio 4, Monday) was an amazing documentary that was partly about one child's attempt to claim his image for himself. It was amazing for the same reason that Kenneth Hall, of all 11-year-olds, was deemed worthy of the documentary treatment.
This north Down child is autistic, with the form known as Asperger's syndrome. He is also that rare but ever-fascinating sort of autistic child: the genius. He's already got an A in GCSE maths and has written his autobiography.
Mandy McAuley's interview with the monologue-prone Kenneth made for challenging, attention-please radio, just as it clearly made for challenging, attention-please work. She describes it as more negotiation than interview, and any listener who's ever found a working hack truly tiresome must have been cheering him on.
McAuley: "OK, Kenneth, what's the agreement going to be? That `I, Kenneth, agree to answer three more of Mandy's questions' - we'll sign on it. They must be reasonably long answers."
Kenneth: "Yadda yadda."
Kenneth's mother: "And you mustn't use your cheeky tone of voice. Please, Kenneth."
Kenneth: "What's the other side of the deal?"
Kenneth's mother, an ex-barrister called Brenda, brokered the contract, and the programme could just about proceed. She was a great interviewee, honest in the modern mode of parents in her position, unselfconsciously using words like "weird" and "authoritarian" to describe her son's behaviour, even as a very young child. (It's hardly surprising: he says he read The Narnia Chronicles before he started primary school.)
School wasn't a success, he said. "The sound of children's chatter was like dynamite going off in my ears." If his chat sounds a bit literary, it's because much of the "interview" consisted of him reading from his memoirs.
While I don't want to romanticise the life of a child who, for four days prior to the interview, consumed only a bag of peanuts and some Lucozade, the questions about "control" raised by his on-air behaviour, and highlighted in his literary explorations of his condition, were profound, brave and exciting.
What a shame, as his mother says, the outside world can't make more effort to include people with extraordinary, and even ordinary, differences.
Next time you're listening to an AA Roadwatch bulletin - perhaps, as I've often done, as you sail through an alleged traffic black spot - consider this: the AA's all-too-authoritative Conor Faughnan failed the new test for a provisional driving licence, right there on 2FM on Wednesday morning.
That wasn't the way The Gerry Ryan Show (2FM, Monday to Friday) was looking at it, but based on the information Ryan - and every other radio host covering this blitzed-out story - gave us, it seems a fair interpretation. Ryan put seven of the test's multiple-choice questions to Faughnan, the first six of which were easy enough. The seventh was about the likely circumstances of a tractor tipping over, and it tripped him up.
Six out of seven, still, wasn't that great?
Well, no. We were told a passing grade in the real test, once it's up and running, will be 35 out of 40, or 87.5 per cent. Whereas six out of seven is, um, let's see . . . something lower than that, anyway.
It's not a lot less, and I know enough about lies, damn lies et cetera to know it would be cheeky to extrapolate with certainty about Faughnan's performance on 40 questions based on his failure on seven.
But Ryan owes it to us, as a public service broadcaster, to get the AA dude back in the studio, pop the 40 questions, and ascertain once and for all the colour of the man's qualifications.
JUST to prove the public-service lark is not limited to the Montrose mafia, those nice people at The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) are doing a lovely wee series of mini symposia on some of the icons of the 20th century.
I managed to hear this week's chat about Karl Marx between Eamon Dunphy, the programme's presenter, and Tony Cronin, and while I'm open to submissions from readers with more accurate timing, I made it about eight minutes before Dunphy realised Marx didn't live in the 20th century.
Ah sure, what harm? Cronin had his facts straight and his professorial tone true. I particularly liked it when Dunphy sneered about "the dictatorship of the proletariat", and Cronin sneered right back at him about the rather more familiar "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".
While much of the exchange was dedicated to the dubious proposition that Marx wasn't a communist, as insults to listeners' intelligence go it was hardly in Strawberry Alarm Clock territory.
No doubt some Marxists (yes, there are some Marxists) were hopping to the phones to explain how genuine 20th-century thinkers have intellectually finessed the ideas of old 19th-century Karl, keeping them alive and applicable. But they can't have been entirely displeased: where else in the English-speaking world in 2001 would you find a leading national current-affairs programme delivering the unwavering conclusion that you can't talk about understanding the world without at least picking up the analytical tools inherited from Marx?
Next, as the man said, the point is not just to understand the world but to change it - right, Eamon?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie