SOURCEY TODAY ALLOWS MINISTER TO SLUR DOCS

04-07-2008

Stirrer blogger and Birmingham consultant Dr David Nicholl has lodged a formal complaint about the BBC’s “scurrilous” news programme Today after it failed to challenge Health Minister Ben Bradshaw's claim that GP's have a “gentleman’s agreement” to stop patients switching surgeries. Doc Dave says Bradshaw was allowed to break the Beeb's own rules which forbid the reporting of unsourced allegations.

Dear Sir,

I am not a GP but I would like to formally complain about the reporting of the Today programme's top story http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7486000/7486975.stm.

Essentially the BBC reported the comments of Health Minister, Ben Bradshaw, that GP's are in effect running a cartel with a "gentleman's agreement" to avoid taking on patients. Yet the BBC did not challenge Mr Bradshaw to produce any evidence to support these claims.

Further on the BBC's website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7475985.stm, Mr Bradshaw claims that there is one GP practice with only 2 patients - again no journalist has challenged him to produce any evidence to back this claim. There was no second source to this story in effect.

Yet just over a year ago I was interviewed by the BBC's Michele Paduano when I accused 2 ministers of Health (Patricia Hewitt) of either lying or misleading Parliament over the data in the relation to the junior doctors training scandal.

The BBC even had a second source for the story, an e-mail from the President of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Ian Gilmore, which entirely backed my claims. Yet that interview was never broadcast, as the RCP mysteriously couldn't remember where they got the figures from.

I was told by the BBC that since the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly affair that they will only run a story if they have 2 sources.

Yet the Today programme is quite prepared to run a scurrilous rumour from one junior minister without presenting any evidence to back the story up....or indeed a second source.

I think this is dreadful and frankly when a programme like Today fails to take a government minister to task over such a rumour, they are failing in their jobs as journalists. I would also point out that Mr Bradshaw is a former BBC journalist and his partner works for the BBC, could this explain why the BBC are being so soft on him?

I await your reply.

Yours sincerely

David Nicholl