The BBC, now officially the unofficial news station for the Conservative party, came a cropper over the weekend when Hugh Squim, the oleaginous health editor for Broadcasting British Conservatism, reported that a leaked draft NHS white paper proposing radical changes to the NHS ‘would see a reduced role for the private sector’, when in fact it says nothing of the sort. Squim subsequently re-wrote the offending paragraph after being hand-bagged on twitter by the redoubtable Prof P, but the episode only goes to show how sloppy the BBC news reporting has become. It is the BBC’s job to give us unbiased fact based news, not our job to correct it’s shoddy reporting with the true facts. What can we glean from the leaked draft?
