BE honest! Can you say, hand on heart, that you absolutely understand what the doctors’ strikes are all about?
Week after week I have tried to penetrate the bilateral propaganda and find the truth but even now, with the threatened second stoppage ‘suspended’, I’m no further forward.
All the media has offered me is ‘balance’: quotes from a spokesman for one side pitted against quotes from a spokesperson for the other. The winner is simply the most persuasive, especially if he or she is backed-up by a baying audience.
If the BBC think the recent Question Time audience wasn’t ‘fixed’ they need help from the people in white coats. At one point, David Dimbleby even had to ask the doctors to pipe down.
The government says it wants to make sure doctors work safer hours. The doctors say the deal would force them into longer, and therefore more dangerous, hours. Where does the truth lie? Search me!
It’s the same with ‘Brexit’. Will we be better off in Europe or out? Most of us haven’t a real clue and the only sources of ‘information’ are allied to the In or Out camps. The promised (or threatened!) referendum will offer us one of the most important choices we’ll ever be faced with and we are going into it awash with propaganda and little else.
Newspapers will push you in the direction of the particular shade of politics they espouse. So will commentators on TV and radio. They profess neutrality but their partisanship is obvious. ‘Balance’ in all these issues is merely an obfuscation of the truth.
As for the ‘facts’ about climate change, don’t even GO there!
Years ago, when I was part of a consortium bidding for a TV franchise, we offered a service we called Factman. It would have offered unvarnished facts on the topics of the day, facts and nothing but facts, we promised. Not an opinion, informed or otherwise, nor any comment in sight.
I still believe a fortune awaits someone brave enough (and uncommitted to any cause other than the pursuit of truth) to set up a Factman site.
The truth on on every issue must lie out there somewhere.
