“Hello, my name is The Daily Mail, and I twist your words”
Inforrm’s Blog provides this informative insight into how the Daily Mail reports stories about the NHS:
Read the excesses of parts of the British Press for long enough and one gets quite hardened to distortions, misreporting and twisting of the truth.
But every now and again something so horribly ugly and mean comes along that it stops you in your tracks.
So it is with one case involving Dr Kate Granger. She is the heroic woman medical registrar battling an incurable cancer who started the “Hello my name is…” campaign.
At the last count her campaign to improve patient experiences in the NHS had recorded 26 million Twitter impressions.
Dr Granger has become an international phenomenon. She decided to stop her own treatment when, as she put it “the costs started to outweigh the benefits” and went back to work in Wakefield looking after elderly patients while continuing to campaign for more person-centred care.
Her husband, Chris Pointon, has just extracted a sort of apology from The Daily Mail through a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) for an appalling distortion of her speech to the NHS Confederation conference in June.
Under the headline “How NHS dehumanises patients, by doctor 32, who is dying of a rare form of cancer,” The Daily Mail ran a 750-word hatchet job that vilifies the NHS and grossly misrepresents what she said. It strings accurate but out-of-context snippets of the speech and uses them as ammunition to bash the health service.
The really odd thing about the report is that it completely misses out any mention of her campaign or that she is completely dedicated to the NHS.
To twist what somebody has to say that much is bad enough under any circumstances; but to do so when she has only weeks left to live and has dedicated her life to improving the NHS is almost unspeakable.
There’s more – so visit the article on Inforrm’s Blog to read it.
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The Mail are always happy to print junk about the NHS, like the oft repeated myths about Stafford hospital like people drinking from flower vases which had been removed years before the alleged incident or the death rates which it has exaggerated beyond all belief but it never reports how one of the best children’s wards is going to be closed because of this bull or mothers will be denied maternity because of this and there are now people dying because of the loss of overnight a/e facilities and the emergency ambulances being out of the area when needed, also it failed to even mention that the hospital which wants to take all of staffords income but not its patients has been highlighted for poor care recently not the care which bad management of understaffing the wards at Stafford caused 8 years ago. If you are a Fail reader you would think that no one would want to go to stafford hospital but its car parks, which have a higher capacity than those at Stoke are frequently full and people are queuing up to get on them – so much for not wanting to go there. The Fail is leading the government’s headlong rush towards privatisation, to get a few cheap headlines.