BBC Radio 5 Live scaremongers during a pandemic

 

A tweet from Dino, the Editor of BBC News Podcasts

The danger of entrusting mainstream media outlets like the BBC with Twitter accounts is that they'll use them irresponsibly and spread scaremongering fake news during a pandemic. 

It's something the BBC's own disinformation unit ought to urgently investigate - as should the BBC Board and Ofcom. 

BBC Radio 5 Live put out a context-free, sensationalist tweet on New Year's Day:

"It was minimally affecting children in the first wave...we now have a whole ward of children here."

Laura Duffel, a matron in a London Hospital, tells Adrian Chiles about the Covid situation in hospitals.

It 'went viral', apparently reaching millions.

It also understandably provoked fury for risking scaring the bejesus out of the public with the idea of whole wards of children falling prey to Covid.

Many clinicians objected, saying it wasn't true and reassuring us that masses of children aren't falling victim en masse to the pandemic.

The Royal College of Paediatricians waded in, objecting too, and the BBC - doubtless panicked - put out a placatory piece on their news website dismissing the scare (without blaming their BBC colleagues). 

Radio 5 Live, however, with more brass neck than a giant statue of a member of the Kim Dynasty in Pyongyang - and without deleting their original viral tweet - then posted this:

Responding to media reports of increased admissions of children and young people with Covid-19, Professor Russell Viner, President of the RCPCH, has released the following statement....

Prof Viner's statement duly rubbished the scare the BBC had first set running (without mentioning the BBC). 

This BBC tweet was such a weasel-like response that whoever wrote it really ought to be made the next Chief Weasel at the next National Weasels' Congress. 

It was they themselves who reported it, indeed in the very same tweet from the very same BBC 5 Live feed that this reply was tagged onto. It was Radio 5 Live that did the damage with its shoddy, scaremongering 'journalism'. They are the guilty party here.

Talk about 'passing the buck'! 

The more I look into it the sorrier I feel for Laura Duffell though. 

I've heard the whole interview. Yes - though we had to find this out for ourselves because the BBC certainly didn't give us even the slightest hint of any of it - Laura's an activist local union leader who keeps appearing on the media and who supports Black Lives Matter and who leads strikes against the Tory Government over nurses' pay, but listening to her interview on Radio 5 I don't doubt that she meant well and told the truth as she saw it, doubtless just saying what she felt, off the cuff, under pressure, and overstating things.

No, I blame BBC Radio 5 Live for editing what she said, turning it into a sensationalist clickbait soundbite and tweeting it without concern for the truth or the public good.

It probably helped that it also fitted in with their way of thinking. 

People at BBC Radio 5 Live ought to be held to account for this. It's too serious and scandalous to be brushed aside in the usual way. It brings their journalism into disrepute.