The failing I'm talking about is, simply put, the conceit that government is the whole of governance. It was primarily governance, not government, that shaped the fate of these children. Government is what you think it is. Governance reaches beyond government, its primary component, to embrace the exercise of authority or control by other power centers. None is more important than the large corporation, partly because its ability to govern the government often stands in the way of adequate deterrents, punishment and redress.
Government kills and injures by, say, sending people to Vietnam.
The corporation does the same, whether carelessly or knowingly and willfully, by providing unreasonably dangerous workplaces, by selling and promoting unsafe or defective products, and by poisoning the environment. Poorly designed cars alone have caused hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths and millions of avoidable injuries. The press celebrates its duty to report and comment upon governmental misconduct. There is a logically inseparable parallel duty, and it is toward extragovernmental misgovernance, by larger corporations, in particular. The latter duty runs against the press grain.