This polemic explores a newspaper article about youth justice, suggesting a dominant discourse holds a powerful hegemony over large parts of the British media through which young people generally, & those in trouble with the law, are demonized. When events take place which threaten to disrupt that discourse, strenuous journalistic efforts have to be made to counteract the disruption & to reaffirm established understandings, however flawed they may be. This article anatomizes that process in operation & in relation to a particular event – the 2004 suicide of a 14-year-old boy, the youngest child ever to take his own life while in the care & custody of the modern British penal system. (18 refs.)