For those if you blissfully unaware of India Knight, she is a journalist. I am tempted to say contemporary sensationalist and none too shabby at creating her own questionable self-publicity through what would seem by any means necessary.

Dear Ms Knight,

Having read your wildly ill-considered musings in the Sunday Times News Review, I felt compelled to respond. That, if I may point out from the get-go, is the only positive thing I take from your article. The simple fact that you would motivate a usually placid and amiable member of the British public (and devoted Times reader to boot) speaks volumes. If, however, you are going to tar the general populace with your preverbial 'shitty-stick', I am duty -bound to defend myself, and others like me. Most of whom, recognise these comments for what they are. That being journalistic attention-whoring in the first instance, and even more unpleasantly, unbridled and misguided high-brow swagger at an audience that is smarter than you are.

Most of your readers will be shocked at your ability to blame them for the interest surrounding the McCanns. Your responsibility is to report the news, sagely, honestly and without bias. This includes bias not only about the news, but also about your readers.

When you sat down to write your piece, I wonder what was going through your mind. I wouldn't like to think that you would be siting in front of your internet access, fingertips poised precariously over your pirate copy of Microsoft Windows, thinking;

"I know, I'll call my readers vitriolic, thoughtless and as individual as the dumbest sheep in the flock. Happy to be led where they are taken and swallow both truth and lie in equal measure.

I can guess what you weren't thinking. Your first thought wasn't to defend Kate McCann. Your first thought was to be controversial enough to get your article on the first page of section five. Please credit your audience with enough intelligence to know the difference. It is your continual lack of awareness in this department that makes your inane finger-pointing all the more frustrating, if only for the simple reason that you have the outlet that some sensible and considered people crave. Yet you abuse it for what seems mere self-promotion. That's not just folly, that's plain ignorant too.

Now I know you have a job to do like everybody else that works for a living, but do the job you're paid to do, and report the news. Your comments about how the internet is to blame for all things evil is farcical. The tale you tell about the press being whiter than white is either a downright lie or an absent-minded lack of understanding of the industry in which you work.

Not all bloggers (of which I include myself) are thoughtless individuals who hop up and down at their desks looking for an avenue of self-indulgence the way you clearly do. The majority of those people of which you speak are sane, sensible and considered in their opinions and gather information from many sources before making up their own mind about what they believe to be the truth about anything.

Whilst you blithely refer to the McCann's suffering, be it real or imagined, you spend no time telling your readership anything new about the story itself, which I am guessing is your reason for being. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you want to philosophise about the general well-being of the human race and just where it is we are all going wrong, please write a book about it instead. 

Some time ago, I wrote an email to Sir Tim Berner-Lees, who is largely recognised for the invention of the World Wide Web. In my correspondence, I asked him to explain whether he thought his invention, though inspired in it's infancy, had actually turned out to be a good idea, and did he regret doing it, given all of the online piracy, junk emails, identity fraud, grooming of minors and terrorist communications that had sprung after it went global. I was playing Devils' Advocate. I already had my own opinion about his invention.

Sir Tim wrote back roughly a week later, suggesting that I made some very credible points. However, he defended his invention quite easily. He admitted that bad things do indeed happen on the internet that may not have been possible before it's invention, but there were also many good things that come from it too. I won't go into the million or so reasons I could suggest, but the simple fact that I, a mere member of the general populace, could ask direct questions of the inventor of something so vast and affecting the whole world so completely, though the very medium of his invention proved, in my eyes at least, it's own right ot exist. 

Your article seems not so much about the treatment that the McCann's have suffered at the hands of the world's public, which has a readership far wider than yourself, incidentally, but more about the ineptitude of the world to understand how to carefully and succinctly express it's opinions, daft as they may be.

See where I am going here? Grab yourself a mirror Ms Knight and look yourself in the eyes and just wonder for a moment exactly where you have placed yourself.  Daft opinion and the right to free self-expression? Is that not exactly what you are doing?

Anyway, a final thought to leave you with. We do not work in the news. We rely on you to provide it for us.Hence, we did not report the fact that Maddy was missing and could have been abducted. We weren't the first to suggest that the parents may be responsible for the loss of their daughter. We didn't arrest the McCann's and question them for twelve hours, nor did we report on it.

The reason you have blogs and opinion on a whole variety of subjects online is because you have news online, all the time. Normal people do not make up the news and expect to be believed. They have a right to express their views on a news story that has been brought to their attention, however.

Don't blame the public for the treatment of the McCanns. I know you don't like hearing it, but I still blame the media. Collectively, I trust you by you, I mean collectively) even less after your little dummy-spitting, foot-stamping outburst.

Therefore, I will continue to use my own choice of resources for my news and make up my own mind, as I always have. The only thing you have highlighted here is a knack of posturing and finger-pointing, keen to uphold an industry that you, at least, believes should garner more respect than it does.