Auntie Is Unwell

Shantel Burns writes:

OpenDemocracy’s ourBeeb project have published a report which details how the BBC has failed in its responsibilities to inform the British public about the truth surrounding the highly controversial NHS Bill. Titled: How the BBC betrayed the NHS: an exclusive report on two years of censorship and distortion, it gives a thorough account of a silence around the NHS bill within the BBC.

It details the apparent keenness of the BBC to follow the government’s positive privatised NHS spiel (The…Bill will allow GPs to get control … of the NHS budget) and ignore the many reports that tell a whole new, accurate story. They say that on the day the Health and Social Care Act was approved and passed through the House of Lords (19th March 2012), not one article was published on the BBC’s online news page on the NHS.

Similarly, the BBC failed to report that former Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, received £21,000 to his personal office from John Nash the then chairman of Care UK – a health firm with a substantial income from the NHS. Nash also founded Sovereign Capital which runs a number of private health firms. The Daily Mail reported on the business activities of Andrew Lansley’s wife, Sally Low. ‘Low Associates’ which was found to be boasting of its ability to help ‘make the link between the public and private sectors’ – sounds familiar.

Labour MP Grahame Morris said it constituted a “clear conflict of interest” and suggested Lansley’s position was no longer tenable. This still failed to make a ripple of news within the BBC. A number of unreported stories follow a similar tone including a story from Liberal Conspiracy which reported that the University Hospital of North Staffordshire (UNSH) had been charging A&E patients for any drugs they needed.

The report notes the BBC have refused an FOI request to find out how many complaints have been made about the lack of news surrounding the NHS bill. The report also highlights a strange influx of reports from the BBC after the NHS bill had safely been passed through the House of Lords. Besides the live streams on Democracy Live, the climax of one of the most controversial bills in recent history merited not a single article. With the bill safely passed, however, the next day saw a stream of seven articles.

The report focuses on mainly the output of BBC Online, in its news and analysis. It concludes: “It is not in the government that the strength of the BBC lies – a parliamentary system captured by forces inherently opposed to its existence – but in the British public, the support of which it should rigorously protect.”