Dishonest, antidemocratic and lazy

The shambles that is the coverage of health and health policy in the media is exposed by this excellent lecture that Dr Grumble pointed me towards. It is a topic I have spoken about many times in the past, the fact that that so many of the journalists that cover health and health policy have no education or training in this area is an utter shambles. The lack of decent educated journalists for health has combined with the problems with the mainstream media (that has been dumbed down as a result of reducing revenues that have led to much cheaper, lazier and more poorly researched stories) to quite devastating effect.

This has led to the current shambles. All one reads in the mainstream media on health is the cheap and easy reproduction of press releases by short cut taking hacks, these press releases from lobby groups and government direct the direction and news follows. There is no sensible analysis of the drivel that is fed to them in the form of press releases, the journalists just churn out manufactured partisan dross. The point made in the above lecture is a good one, this key point is that the public are now so unaware and uneducated on these serious issues in health that the government is able to get away with wasting billions of taxpayer's money on the current corrupt and grossly inefficient privatisation agenda. The government has done this quite deliberately, if the public were aware of what was going on thanks to an open and well informed media then they would not stand for it, as things are when people wake up to it, it will all be too late to do anything about it and turn back the clock.