Duty of Candour Should Apply to the BBC
The Hillsborough Law should apply to the state broadcaster: journalists parroting propaganda that potentially results in death or injury should be subject to criminal prosecution.
Sometimes I get the impression that there might be a few people left in the BBC who might still see the importance of the Corporation speaking truth unto nations (the commissioning editors for docudrama, for example). The fact that the BBC is able to run Dopesick (about the Oxycontin scandal) and The Dropout (about the Theranos diagnostic testing scam and corporate fraud) would indicate that a few people in the Corporation are well aware that there’s a growing appetite for content that draws attention to healthcare related corruption and cover-up. Although the fact that both dramas are set in America and relate to American healthcare companies is, perhaps, telling.
It will not be lost on many of us, of course, that the BBC itself has been intimately involved in the ongoing cover-up related to COVID-19. Indeed the corporation was on the front line: amplifying the fear campaign around the so-called pandemic; promoting the take-up of the so-called vaccines; failing to question the efficacy or safety of the vaccines; not covering the public campaigns against the government’s response to vaccine coercion or lockdown; de-platforming people critical of the government’s COVID-19 response; failing to cover damage caused by the vaccines or failings of vaccine testing; and close proximity of BBC journalists to the NHS comms team throughout the last four years. In short, the BBC has, essentially, been behaving as a propaganda unit of the government.
The government may well argue that this was essential to ensure that its emergency messages could not be diluted at a time of national emergency. But, of course, this was an emergency manufactured by the government itself - but ultimately defined by a cohort of drug and tech companies, Bill Gates’ NGOs (including the WHO) with vast amounts to gain from a global pandemic of media messaging and fear, and other technocrats.
The result of this, of course, is that the BBC has lost all journalistic credibility and is essentially seen as a poodle for corporate interests channelled through the government of the day.
It may well be that it might confess, at some point in the future, that it had no choice in the matter (as it is dependent on licence-tax revenue to exist). But, at the very least, the Corporation should have insisted that its editorial output carry some type of disclaimer that it had been mandated by its handlers.
There is precedent for this type of disclaimer being used. During the period (decades ago) when Sinn Fein Party spokespeople were banned from speaking on-air on terrestrial television, the BBC routinely dubbed actors’ voices to get around the government restrictions - announcing on-air that the restrictions meant the real voices of IRA apologists couldn’t be used. In short, it was a work-to-rule response to ensure that the editorial restrictions were lifted and allowed the BBC to retain some degree of editorial integrity.
But, during Covid, there was a blitz-spirit invoked by the government and its state broadcaster - that we all had to pull together to defeat this deadly disease killing the nation’s grannies. Free speech rules were suspended and the BBC ran an enforcement team in cahoots with the so-called Trusted News Initiative (a panel of enforcers involving Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube and Reuters).
The existence of the ‘virus’ was never questioned - nor its death-causality or airborne infectious capability. All the government’s patently ridiculous regulations were deemed essential for public health. Anyone seen to be challenging this consensus (based on “the science”) was labelled a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer. Anyone who questioned the narrative, even commentators who were called-upon to take part in BBC political debates on a frequent basis prior to 2020, were dropped. Dissent was deemed to be mis-information. In my case I was kicked off-air mid-sentence.
BBC COVID-mania even extended to the broadcaster’s over-the-top social distancing and fear-mongering on its premises. While I was almost immediately de-platformed by the BBC when I started expressing a view that the emperor had no clothes, others, who played along a little longer, told me of bizarre, draconian social distancing rules for studio visits. It was almost as though the BBC had instructions from on-high to behave less like Auntie, and more like the crazy psychopathic cross-dressing Aunt locked-up in the basement.
I appreciate that I’ve been writing this type of content for some time and it may sound like some needle-hopping vinyl-record. But there’s a critical reason for me raising the BBC’s awfulness again. It relates to a story that has been recurring over the last few years in Northern Ireland - and was at the top of most of the local TV news bulletins a couple of days ago. And, even though it’s a regional story that broke in the UK’s smallest nation, it may have ramifications across the UK and right to the top of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Earlier this week the BBC (in Northern Ireland) ran a story about the possibility of legal sanctions being used against health-care professionals failing a 'duty of candour'. This term, duty of candour, featured in a proposed Law emerging from the Hillsborough Inquiry into the Hillsborough Stadium disaster (and associated cover-up) as well as the Infected Blood Enquiry and Horizon scandal.
The charity INQUEST provides expertise on state related deaths and their investigation - and worked with many of the Hillsborough families. It proposed, after the Hillsborough Inquiry, the Hillsborough Law that “would establish a duty of candour: a codified requirement on public servants, public authorities and corporations to act in the public interest and proactively and truthfully assist investigations, inquests and inquiries of all official kinds, at the earliest possible point, including by the disclosure of all relevant documentation and position statements in which they must set out their narrative of what happened and what went wrong. Duty of candour obligations would be the most effective way to end evasive and obstructive practices following contentious deaths”.
According to an article on the BBC website earlier this week, "Alan Roberts, whose daughter's death was examined by the Northern Ireland hyponatraemia inquiry which found there had been a "cover-up" into how she died, said doctors must be legally bound to tell the truth".
This cover-up involved Northern Ireland’s most senior healthcare bureaucrats: Sir Michael McBride and Prof Ian Young. Both men were also at the forefront of advising the Northern Ireland Health Minister, Robin Swann, and also speaking to the media. However, this is what the hyponatraemia inquiry Chairman said about Professor Young in its report: Prof Young "shifted from his initial independent role advising Dr McBride to one of protecting the hospital and its doctors”. Or, in other words, he acted to cover-up the failings of doctors and the hospital that killed Claire Roberts and two other children in their care.
The article on the BBC website was written by Marie-Louise Connolly, BBC News NI health correspondent. However, over the last 4 years Ms Connolly has been reluctant to allow many of us to question the official narrative surrounding the Northern Ireland Executive's Covid response - nor the safety of recommending vaccines that have resulted in the deaths of many, including BBC journalist Lisa Shaw - whose death was subject to an inquest which found that she died because of complications arising from the administration of a Covid vaccine.
Ms Connolly has blocked me on X - as well as many others who have consistently questioned why she has actively parroted Department for Health ‘lines’ - lines, it would appear, that have been fed to her by former BBC colleagues who are now insiders at the NHS, Northern Ireland Executive or Northern Ireland Assembly. Ms Connolly’s former Producer colleague at BBC Northern Ireland, David Gordon, was appointed Head of Comms for the NI Health Service shortly before the Covid story broke. Former BBC NI Head of Political Programming, Michael Cairns, is now Head of Communications at the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Nationally, Hugh Pym, the BBC’s Health Editor, never questioned the testing regimen for the vaccines, the speed of approval, the squandering of public money on PPE or the appropriateness of lockdown measures. To my knowledge he never even enquired about vaccines’ ingredients. We can only assume that Pym was equally in cahoots with his Department of Health handlers in Whitehall.
In The Dropout, the docudrama about the Theranos scandal (available on BBC iPlayer), insiders at Theranos contact a journalist on the Wall Street Journal. They tell him that Theranos is claiming that it has proprietary technology - but it doesn’t work. Indeed, many of its tests are producing false positives and giving worried patients duff information about their health.
The journalist, of course, pursued the story - despite the fact that WSJ-owner, Rupert Murdoch, had invested over $100m of his own fortune into the company. The story provided the seed that resulted in the exposure of Theranos as a scam and the company’s collapse. But that’s what investigative journalists are supposed to do. They question. They speak to whistle-blowers. They seek out evidence. They provide candour.
During the Covid years, from March 2020, the BBC systematically shut down any opportunity for any questioning of the government Covid narrative. In the case of the BBC in Northern Ireland it blocked citizens asking questions. It acted as a stenographer. It took briefings from health service bureaucrats who had a history of covering-up health service incompetence resulting in the deaths of children. It trusted, implicitly, people who were highly compromised, including doctors making fortunes administering Covid vaccines without seeking informed consent - thereby breaking their hippocratic oaths and their duty of candour. And the BBC has never made clear that it was acting outside normal standards of journalistic integrity.
Earlier this week the Human Rights Commissioner for Northern Ireland, Alyson Kilpatrick, recommended that “healthcare staff who deliberately withhold information should face criminal prosecution in cases involving patient safety and deaths”. In my view, BBC journalists who actively stifle freedom of speech, who act as stenographers for healthcare bureaucrats, and who fail to investigate public health policy that could result in death or injury should also be subject to criminal prosecution. The Hillsborough Law should be enacted across the United Kingdom and should apply to all public bodies and corporations - including the British Broadcasting Corporation.