By sensationally propagating Ray Gosling’s lies as truth the BBC rightly earned its title of euthanasia cheerleader

As reported by the BBC today, Journalist, broadcaster and gay rights activist Ray Gosling has died in hospital in Nottingham.

My sympathy is with Gosling’s family.

However his death revives memories of the time when the BBC’s flagrant promotion of assisted suicide and euthanasia arguably reached its greatest depths.

When the former television journalist confessed on BBC’s Inside Out programme on 15 February 2010 that he had taken a pillow and smothered a gay lover with AIDS who was in ‘terrible, terrible pain’ it very quickly became an international news story.

But it later transpired, after a police investigation involving 32 officers, lasting six months and taking 1,800 hours at a cost of over £45,000 in taxpayers money, that Goslings’ ‘confession’ was simply made up. He did not kill his lover and in fact was not even in the country at the time he died. Furthermore the man did not die in pain.

Gosling was given a 90-day suspended prison sentence at Nottingham Magistrates' Court after pleading guilty to wasting police time. The judge in passing sentence branded him as ‘a sheer liar and fantasist’ guilty of ‘creating and maintaining this cruel fabrication’.

It was very clear at the time the story broke that the BBC intended it to have maximum impact.

The Care Not Killing Alliance (CNK) started getting media calls hours before the programme was originally broadcast regarding a ‘new euthanasia story’ involving a ‘prominent BBC employee’ but we were not allowed to know any of the details. Meanwhile every regional and national BBC news outlet was lining up interviews for the ensuing 24 hours.

We later learnt that Gosling had made his original confession to BBC colleagues four months earlier over a ‘beery lunch’. And the programme itself was filmed some months before it was shown and eventually screened just one week before the Director of Public Prosecutions published his prosecution policy for cases of assisted suicide.

Why did the BBC not inform the police during this time or more carefully investigate what was effectively a confession of murder? How many BBC employees actually knew about it? Was this actually a cynical attempt to influence public and judicial opinion at a critical point in time?

These questions were never satisfactorily answered.

In the days that followed the screening, as well as giving a spate of national and regional broadcasts in the UK (including Five Live and BBC breakfast), I was interviewed by a host of international outlets covering the story – including Italian and Spanish newspaper journalists, Russian, Bolivian, Brazilian and Indian television and the BBC world service. The international interest was huge.

The very same week, both the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph carried the story of Lord Carlile, CNK Chairman, writing to the BBC Director General to allege media bias and to accuse the corporation of adopting an ‘incredibly zealous’ ‘campaigning stance’ on assisted suicide.

The BBC has a long history of acting as a cheerleader for euthanasia and assisted suicide, but with the Gosling affair it plumbed its greatest depths.

The corporation cynically planned months ahead to release a story that was total untrue at a time and in a manner guaranteed to maximise its international impact and to influence public policy.

Not only did it fail in its duty to provide fair and impartial broadcasting. It also failed to report a criminal act to the police, opting instead for the sensational proliferation of partisan propaganda and, in this case, downright lies.

And it used our licence fees to do it.

New round of celebrity-led cheer-leading for assisted suicide

This story is covered in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. 

Euthanasia season has arrived and the pro-death lobby, aided by their cheerleader and press office, the BBC, are now gearing up for a campaign aimed at forcing the legalisation of assisted suicide through British Parliaments both north and south of Hadrian’s Wall. 

Lord Falconer’s assisted suicide bill had its first reading in the House of Lords in May and Margo Macdonald’s Scottish bill is to be published next month.

Expect no let up for several months as story after supportive story mysteriously fills our television screens and airwaves.

In pushing their cause, this alliance of private campaigners and publicly-funded ‘news’ generators will face four major lines of opposition: parliamentarians, doctors, faith groups and disabled people.

Neutralising these opponents will be their major focus as they seek to build their case around emotive testimonies and celebrity endorsement (See here and listen here for why their ideas should actually be given short shrift).

Their aim will be to find ‘role models’ from each of these ‘problem groups’ willing to become a public voice for their campaign to help create the impression that their proposals of ‘assisted dying with safeguards’ have universal backing.

Dignity in Dying (DID), the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society, has already established a group of retired professors and past medical leaders - originally HPFC but now rebranded HPAD (Health Professionals for Assisted Dying) - to counter the inconvenient fact that the BMA, all major medical colleges and two thirds of all doctors are opposed to any change in the law. They are now infiltrating the RCGP to try to push it neutral after failing to do the same with the BMA and have support from the editor of the BMJ. HPAD represents a massive 0.25% of doctors (Yes that's one quarter of one per cent).

Gathering a lobby of clerics has proved even more difficult but DID has managed to scrape together a flock of ‘faith leaders’ under the leadership of liberal rabbi Jonathan Romain. Interfaith Leaders for Dignity In Dying (or IFDiD) uses highly unorthodox interpretations of sacred texts to push the view that helping people to kill themselves is consistent with ‘loving one’s neighbour’.

In parliament there is the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Choice at the End of Life chaired by Heidi Alexander, Labour MP for Lewisham East. But their real champion is Lord Falconer, whose sham commission on ‘assisted dying’, stacked full of euthanasia sympathisers, recommended just over a year ago that the law should be changed to allow doctors to be licensed to dispense lethal drugs to mentally competent adults with less than six months to live. His bill currently before parliament seeks to make this a reality.

Disabled people have been much more difficult to pull into line, especially given that all the country’s major disability advocacy groups – SCOPE, Disability Rights UK, Not Dead Yet UK and UKDPC – remain opposed to any change in the law. They, more than anyone, know how easily vulnerable people can be pushed into ending their lives so as not to be a financial or emotional burden to others. 

So the pro-death lobby has been looking for a disabled people’s champion to become the new poster boy for the campaign. And this week they found him –in celebrity scientist Stephen Hawking.

The only missing ingredient was the means of getting international media coverage for Falconer and Hawking. Enter the BBC.

The publication of Hawking’s new book provided the hook for an invitation onto the BBC Breakfast national news programme last Tuesday where Hawking could be asked the question that would elicit the answer required to create the international news story:

‘I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives and those who help them should be free from prosecution. But there must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurised into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent, as would have been the case with me.’

Now the stage was fully set for Falconer the next day, on the very same programme, to promote his bill as the solution. But in order for him to do this unimpeded the opportunity for any cross-examination to take place, or contrary position to be put, had to be nullified.

On Tuesday night I received a text from a BBC Breakfast producer asking me, as campaign director of the Care Not Killing Alliance, to contribute to the programme at 0820 the following day:

‘Hi Peter, James at BBC Breakfast here. We’d like you on the show tomorrow morning talking about Stephen Hawking. Are you available?’

I phoned back and accepted. ‘James’ lined me up to speak to camera at the Oxford Street Studios the following morning and said he would ring me back in five minutes to confirm travel arrangements.

Ten minutes later I was dumped by text:

‘Thanks for speaking to me just now. Afraid we’re not going to talk to you on the programme on this occasion. Sorry for the hassle. James, BBC Breakfast.’

I was naturally interested to see who they had in my place. But next morning, it was a one-to-one interview with Lord Falconer that was heavily billed throughout the programme.

So how did our national broadcaster provide ‘balanced coverage’ on this contentious issue?

Basically we had the extract from Hawking interview the previous day followed by the presenters, Bill Turnbull and Susannah Reid, offering Falconer an open goal to say what he wanted in order to promote his bill.

Falconer understandably grasped the opportunity with both hands and waxed lyrical about how wonderful things were in Oregon and will be here too once his bill was passed - far safer than at present when we all have to go off to Switzerland where there are no ‘safeguards’. There was no serious challenge and no opposing view put.

Why did they drop me? One can only speculate. I suspect that BBC cheer-leading played a part, but I suspect also that Falconer, possibly remembering our last debate on the Radio Four Today programme, might have said that he would prefer to speak unopposed and they deferred to his requests. 

I guess we will never know – unless someone truly in the know speaks out.

But this is just the latest in a long line of episodes of BBC cheerleading for various forms of euthanasia.

Yes, I’ve written to the Director General of the BBC about it and have encouraged others to complain. But I am not holding my breath.

In the meantime I have been privy to a conversation this week of angry disability rights leaders wondering what they have to do to get their voices heard in the media. My advice is not to try the BBC. 

Panorama highlights liberal interpretation of abortion law by British doctors

Last Monday I took part in the BBC Panorama programme ‘The Great Abortion Divide’ (watch it on I-Player).

It was presented by Victoria Derbyshire (pictured) and produced by Elizabeth Byrne.

Although extremely controversial it has had very little coverage in the media with only the BBC, Guardian and Times (£) so far reporting on it.

The programme was billed as follows:

‘Abortion is more controversial than ever, with pro-life activists challenging pregnant women as they try to enter clinics. Doctors in most of the UK are signing off terminations on questionable mental health grounds, while in Northern Ireland women and doctors risk life in prison over abortion. So is our legislation hopelessly outdated?’

Victoria Derbyshire, in an article for the Times, (£) asked how it can be so easy to terminate a pregnancy in Croydon, but criminal to do so in Belfast.

This highlights the little known fact that abortion is still effectively illegal in Northern Ireland but there is a situation tantamount to abortion on demand in the rest of the UK where there were over 200,000 abortions last year, 98% on mental health grounds.

I was filmed for an hour last autumn from which they used four sound bites for this programme but I was happy with what they took and felt they put my case well.

The programme was originally due to be screened last December but was held over due to other priorities and I suspect because they also wanted to make reference to the Savita case.

The main point I made in the programme, which I had made previously on the Radio Four Today Programme, is that 98% of abortions in Britain are technically illegal.

This is because they are carried out on grounds that continuing with the pregnancy constitutes a greater risk to a mother’s mental health than having an abortion does.

But in fact a comprehensive study carried out in 2011 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists found that there was no evidence to show that having an abortion posed less risk to mental health than continuing with an unwanted pregnancy.

So when doctors sign an abortion authorisation form (a statutory document) saying that it does I believe they are in effect committing a form of perjury.

Dr Clare Gerada, chairwoman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said in response to this on the programme however that the current interpretation was realistic as there is no way to predict the impact of continuing a pregnancy on a woman's mental health. She was in effect giving the benefit of any doubt to the mother. Here words were as follows:

‘What we have is what the woman tells us. It is not for me to judge her or be moralistic, it is for me to explore potential other options, but to take her at face value.’

So in other words if the mother thinks that continuing with the pregnancy poses a greater risk to her mental health than having an abortion then she is right, regardless of what the medical evidence actually shows. I wonder if Gerada applies this same diagnostic principle to conditions other than mental health problems.

In saying this I believe Gerada is actually misinterpreting the law. In signing an abortion authorisation she is making a statement that as a doctor she believes in good faith ‘that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the mental health of the pregnant woman’.

She is not actually being asked to make a moral judgement but a medical judgement.

Imagine if we were to substitute another condition for ‘mental health’:

‘I believe that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of (ovarian cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease) to the pregnant woman.’

This would be a medical opinion subject to a test of evidence – as is also danger to mental health.

I see that BPAS (£), Britain’s leading abortion provider, has since leapt to Gerada’s defence. BPAS has since said that doctors are 'not circumventing or breaking the law; they are complying with the law, exercising their clinical judgment and caring for their patients'. Well that is not actually for BPAS to decide.

And if authorising the deaths of 196,000 living human beings is 'caring for their patients' then doctors have moved some distance from the Hippocratic Oath and Declaration of Geneva which actually forbid them performing abortion.

Will the fact that 196,000 abortions are being carried out in the UK every year on these spurious grounds (98% of the total) be at any point the subject of a court case, a police investigation, a GMC inquiry, a parliamentary inquiry, or perhaps even a parliamentary question? We will have to wait and see.

To carry out an abortion on grounds outside those listed in the Abortion Act is still a crime in Britain – and a crime subject to a custodial sentence.

So is perjury – and knowingly making false claims on a statutory document (like an abortion authorisation form) is a form of perjury under the Perjury Act of 1911.

These acts are crimes because abortion is a serious matter, involving as it does the ending of a human life. And as I said on the programme, no one is more innocent, more vulnerable and killed in greater numbers that the preborn baby. Abortion now accounts for 27%, over one in four, of all human deaths in Britain.

One more thing - the programme claimed, without supplying any evidence, that hundreds of women died every year in Britain from illegal abortions prior to the introduction of the Abortion Act. This is patently false as I have argued previously on this blog.

It was good to see the issues around abortion aired again but deep questions still remain, mostly about the abuses by doctors of the current law.

I wonder if anything will be done about this practice which has now been defended on national television by the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

I am not holding my breath.

Ten questions you never hear asked on the media

I was on the Radio Four Today programme earlier this week debating Lord Falconer (listen here for Radio Four and here for Radio Five Live and ) on whether or not assisted suicide should be legalised in the light of ten years of British people going to the Dignitas facility in Switzerland to end their lives.

Prior to our debate the programme ran a prime time recorded interview with Win Crew, wife of one of the first Britons to die there which I listened to in the taxi on the way in.

It was typical of such interviews. The usually robust Evan Davies
(pictured), rather than giving her a challenging and searching cross-examination, instead reverted to slow underarm bowling in the apparent hope that she might hit each question over the boundary in the cause of legalisation.

She, not understandably, made the most of being given an international media platform to propagate her views effectively unchallenged.

The BBC later gave the interview huge prominence in keeping with their ‘assisted suicide cheerleader’ policy whilst our debate was relegated to the graveyard slot just prior to 9am.

In the light of this not atypical experience I was interested to see this post on Life Site News on the not unrelated issue of abortion – another where the liberal elite who dominate the media do what they can to ensure that really searching questions are never asked.

I have virtually never heard these ten questions asked (or answered) on media but invite anyone with a prochoice position to attempt to answer them either here or elsewhere.

They come from over the pond in the lead up to the US presidential election but apply equally well here.

Here’s some food for thought then from Trevin Wax at thegospelcoalition.org blog — ‘Ten questions you never hear a pro-choice candidate asked by the media’.

1. You say you support a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices in regards to abortion and contraception. Are there any restrictions you would approve of?

2. In 2010, The Economist featured a cover story on “the war on girls” and the growth of “gendercide” in the world – abortion based solely on the sex of the baby. Does this phenomenon pose a problem for you or do you believe in the absolute right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy because the unborn fetus is female?

3. In many states, a teenager can have an abortion without her parents’ consent or knowledge but cannot get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental authorization. Do you support any restrictions or parental notification regarding abortion access for minors?

4. If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, when do you believe it begins? At what stage of development should an unborn child have human rights?

5. Currently, when genetic testing reveals an unborn child has Down’s Syndrome, most women choose to abort. How do you answer the charge that this phenomenon resembles the “eugenics” movement a century ago – the slow, but deliberate “weeding out” of those our society would deem “unfit” to live?

6. Do you believe an employer should be forced to violate his or her religious conscience by providing access to abortifacient drugs and contraception to employees?

7. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. has said that “abortion is the white supremacist’s best friend,” pointing to the fact that Black and Latinos represent 25% of our population but account for 59% of all abortions. How do you respond to the charge that the majority of abortion clinics are found in inner-city areas with large numbers of minorities?

8. You describe abortion as a “tragic choice.” If abortion is not morally objectionable, then why is it tragic? Does this mean there is something about abortion that is different than other standard surgical procedures?

9. Do you believe abortion should be legal once the unborn fetus is viable – able to survive outside the womb?

10. If a pregnant woman and her unborn child are murdered, do you believe the criminal should face two counts of murder and serve a harsher sentence?

BBC and Guardian leap to defence of abortion industry

The abortion industry has been under a lot of pressure in recent weeks – first with revelations about illegal abortions for sex selection, then with a Care Quality Commission (CQC) report showing breaches of the law in 20% of 300 ‘clinics’ examined and more recently with peaceful prayer vigils run by ‘40 days for life’.

It is not surprising therefore that they have been attempting to fight back with the assistance of sympathetic journalists working for the BBC and the Guardian.

First we had the publication of a ‘secret’ letter from CQC chairman Dame Jo Williams complaining to the Department of Health that carrying out the inspections meant ‘a total of 580 inspections foregone and a total of 16 inspectors being utilised on a full year basis at an estimated cost of £1.0m’. Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service was given a free BBC platform on the Today Programme to tell us that it was ‘absolutely wrong for the government to order the CQC to abandon all of the other work, in order to prioritise inspections of 500 clinics’. (See Cristina Odone’s commentary)

The BBC, unsurprisingly, did not however report the Health Secretary’s response. One commentator described the incident as follows:

‘A newspaper uncovers widespread criminality in health clinics. The minister responsible requests an immediate investigation, which takes only three days and costs a mere £1 million — less than one ten-millionth of the Health Department’s £105 billion budget. The scandal is stamped out, the guilty face punishment . . . and instead of patting the Health Secretary on the back, the BBC swoops down on him like an avenging angel, flaming with wrath.’

Pre-signing batches of abortion forms to authorise abortions on women that have not even yet been assessed, as doctors at these ‘clinics’ allegedly did, is perjury and it is quite right that both the police and the General Medical Council are currently carrying out an investigation.

Next we had the Guardian running a story about a US ‘charity’ paying for UK medical students to have elective ‘experience’ in BPAS abortion centres, on grounds that the government is not providing enough training for doctors to do late abortions. 'Medical Students for Choice' plans to set up summer 'externships' with BPAS for UK and Irish students to groom a new crop of abortionists. Expect the BBC to pick up the story soon.

I have already argued on this blog that the main reason more doctors don’t do late abortions is that they find it profoundly distasteful to be killing and then dismembering what is so obviously a baby.

Abortion also runs contrary to the Hippocratic Oath and every existing historic code of medical ethics. It is therefore not surprising that so many doctors, of all faiths and none, do not want to be involved in a procedure which they believe should not be part of medical care.

Sadly, the inclusion of abortion as a routine component of Obstetrics and Gynaecology is in large part responsible for many new graduates choosing not to enter that specialty today.

In 1947 the British Medical Association called abortion ‘the greatest crime’.

The fact that the BMA now defends current practice of 200,000 abortions a year in Britain, mostly carried out by its own members, is a measure of how far we have fallen as a profession.

Pratchett programme is further evidence of BBC bias and will fuel more suicides

The BBC’s decision to screen a man's dying moments at the Dignitas suicide facility in a documentary fronted by Terry Pratchett has already come under heavy criticism.

A five-minute sequence in the BBC2 programme, due to be shown on 13 June, shows celebrity author Pratchett witnessing Peter, a British man in his early 70s who has motor neurone disease, taking his own life at the controversial Swiss facility.

This is yet another blatant example of the BBC playing the role of cheerleader in the vigorous campaign being staged by the pro-euthanasia lobby to legalise assisted suicide in Britain.’

Having failed spectacularly in the House of Lords twice since 2006 to convince legislators that legalising assisted suicide is safe, and finding themselves blocked repeatedly by medical professional bodies, Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) is now using celebrity endorsement and media portrayal of suicide in order to soften up public opinion ahead of a new drive to change the law later this year.

By putting their extensive public resources behind this campaign and by giving Terry Pratchett, who is both a patron on DID and key funder of the controversial Falconer Commission, a platform to propagate his views, the BBC is actively fuelling this move to impose assisted suicide on this country and runs the risk of pushing vulnerable people over the edge into taking their lives. It is also flouting both its own guidelines on suicide portrayal and impartiality.

This portrayal of suicide by the BBC, along with Pratchett’s celebrity endorsement, breaches both international and BBC guidelines on suicide portrayal and risks encouraging further suicides amongst those who are sick, elderly or disabled. It is both a recipe for elder abuse and also a threat to vulnerable people, many of whom already feel under pressure at a time of financial crisis and threatened health cuts to end their lives for fear of being a burden on others. The dangers of portraying suicide on the media (Werther effect, suicide contagion, or copycat suicide) are well recognised in the medical literature.

The BBC’s own editorial guidelines on portrayal of suicide are very clear and call for ‘great sensitivity’: ‘Factual reporting and fictional portrayal of suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm have the potential to make such actions appear possible, and even appropriate, to the vulnerable.’

The WHO guidance on the media coverage of suicide is equally unambiguous: ‘Don’t publish photographs or suicide notes. Don’t report specific details of the method used. Don’t give simplistic reasons. Don’t glorify or sensationalize suicide.’

This latest move by the BBC is a disgraceful use of licence-payers money and further evidence of a blatant campaigning stance. The corporation has now produced five documentaries or docudramas since 2008 portraying assisted suicide in a positive light.

Where are the balancing programmes showing the benefits of palliative care, promoting investment on social support for vulnerable people or highlighting the great dangers of legalisation which have convinced parliaments in Australia, France, Canada, Scotland and the US to resist any change in the law in the last twelve months alone? One will not it seems, hear any of this from the BBC.

The BBC is in flagrant breach of both its own guidelines on suicide portrayal and also its public duty to remain impartial. This will inevitably lead to further criticism of bias and will only serve to place the lives of more vulnerable people at risk.

Why I told the Daily Mail that the BBC was acting as the ‘cheerleader’ for assisted suicide

Last Friday I was quoted on the front page of the Daily Mail as saying that the BBC was acting as ‘cheerleader’ in the campaign to legalise assisted suicide.

This article amplifies those comments and gives some of the wider background.

The BBC have recently filmed a man killing himself at the notorious Dignitas suicide facility for a controversial ‘documentary’ to be fronted by celebrity author Terry Pratchett, a prominent supporter of euthanasia.

The programme, entitled ‘Choosing To Die’, due to be screened this summer, follows a 71 year old man (known only as Peter) in the late stages of motor neurone disease as he travels from Britain to the Swiss centre to end his life in the fantasy novelist’s company.

Screening the moment of a suicide victim’s death will be a first for the BBC although a Sky Real Lives programme first crossed the rubicon in doing so back in 2008.

My full newspaper statement was as follows:

‘The BBC is acting like a cheerleader for legalising assisted suicide. It is regrettable that a man’s death will be shown on screen but we are also concerned that this documentary will not be balanced. Given Sir Terry Pratchett’s position, the fear is that it will show all the supposed benefits of assisted death with very little redress.’

Terry Pratchett is already well known as a campaigner for the legalisation of assisted suicide, and provided funding for Lord Falconer’s discredited Commission on Assisted Dying.

Whilst being a patron of Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society), he has, like Michael Irwin and Philip Nitschke, much broader aims than those claimed by DID, who passionately protest (methinks too much) that they want a change in the law only for ‘terminally ill, mentally competent adults’

According to the BBC website, Pratchett has a larger agenda. He believes that ‘everybody possessed of a debilitating and incurable disease should be allowed to pick the hour of their death’. He is quoted in Australia as supporting it for the broader category of ‘seriously ill people’.

The DID website reports his aims as even more far-reaching: ‘I believe passionately that any individual should have the right to choose, as far as it is possible, the time and the conditions of their death.’

This programme will be the fifth produced by the BBC in just three years, presented by a pro-euthanasia campaigner or sympathiser, which has been specifically designed to portray taking one’s own life in a positive light.

‘I'll Die When I Choose’ (8 December 2008) was a BBC Panorama documentary fronted by Margo Macdonald MSP in the lead up to tabling her ‘End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill’ in the Scottish Parliament. The programme screened a total of four times between 8 and 14 December 2008. The bill also received massive coverage by the BBC but was overwhelmingly defeated by 85 to 16 in November 2010.

‘A Short Stay in Switzerland’ (January 2009) was a 90 minute docudrama starring Julie Walters (and written by award-winning writer Frank McGuinness) which told the story of the death of Bath GP Anne Turner at the Dignitas facility in January 2006. It screened seven times between 25 January 2009 and 27 January 2010. BBC health correspondent Fergus Walsh, who accompanied Dr Turner on her final journey, actually played himself in the film.

The 34th Richard Dimbleby Lecture, ‘Shaking hands with death’ (1 February 2010) also featured Terry Pratchett making the case for assisted suicide for patients, like himself, with Alzheimer’s disease. A hand-picked audience in the Royal College of Physicians in London signalled their approval as he described himself ending his life, by nonchalantly sipping poisoned champagne, in his back garden.

BBC East Midlands ‘Inside Out Programme’ (15 February 2010) featured a confession by producer Ray Gosling to smothering a gay lover with AIDS some years before. The story, after an exhaustive police investigation, turned out to be pure fantasy, but not until after the BBC machinery had blown it up into a massive international news story just prior to the Director of Public Prosecutions reporting on his assisted suicide prosecution criteria.

I am also aware of a sixth ‘documentary’ currently being put together, again presented by a keen advocate of legalising assisted suicide, news of which has not yet entered the public domain.

During this three year period there has not been one BBC programme presenting the opposite point of view. This is in spite of the fact that all three parliamentary bills attempting to legalise the practice in the last five years have been heavily defeated and despite the continuing robust opposition to legalisation from disability rights groups, medical professionals and faith groups.

And yet not one representative of any of these groups has been given the opportunity to put their views as prime presenter of a BBC documentary. Other than in news bulletins no specialist in palliative medicine has had access to a BBC documentary to explain the benefits of good care, no disabled person has been able to convey their anxieties about a change in the law and no faith leader has been permitted to present an alternative perspective on suffering and dying.

Specifically, no opponent of legalisation has been given the opportunity by our national (taxpayer funded) broadcaster to put to the British public, in a documentary, the arguments that have three times persuaded parliament about the dangers to vulnerable people of a change in the law.

By contrast, many proponents of assisted suicide, who have expressed a strong persistent wish to be ‘helped to die’ by their own hands, have been granted an international platform by our national broadcaster, to tell their stories in lurid detail and without cross-examination, creating the false impression that the small minority they constitute are somehow representative of all people facing suffering or death.

Each from Reginald Crew to Tony Nicklinson has his or her case highlighted in painstaking detail by the BBC usually featuring long personal interviews and often with substantial extraneous information about their lives emotively conveyed. Contrary views are either not expressed, or are at best relegated to single sentence reactionary soundbites:

Readers will recognise many of the personalities involved as household names: Anne Turner, John Close, Debbie Purdy, Raymond Cutkelvin, Diane Pretty, Daniel James, Sir Edward and Lady Downes, Nan Maitland, and so it goes on and on and on.

In each case, the power of the personal narrative is presented skillfully to shape public opinion, courtesy of the BBC with all of its publicly funded resources being brought to bear.

What is somewhat ironic about this whole process is the fact that there are strict codes about media coverage of suicide, not only from bodies like the World Health Organisation, but also from the BBC itself (on covering both suicide and also criminal acts), which are constantly and repeatedly flouted.

The WHO guidance on the media coverage of suicide is very clear:

‘Don’t publish photographs or suicide notes. Don’t report specific details of the method used. Don’t give simplistic reasons. Don’t glorify or sensationalize suicide. Don’t use religious or cultural stereotypes. Don’t apportion blame.’

The BBC it seems is going full speed in the opposite direction.

By contrast the WHO advice about appropriate media practice is largely ignored by the BBC:

‘Refer to suicide as a completed suicide, not a successful one. Present only relevant data, on the inside pages. Highlight alternatives to suicide. Provide information on help lines and community resources. Publicize risk indicators and warning signs.’

Concerns about the well-documented phenomenon of suicide contagion, especially following suicides carried out by celebrities (more on this later), and the effects of suicide on other individuals and society at large, are simply not part of the narrative when the BBC covers these issues. Instead it has adopted almost a campaigning stance.

No one is denying that the debate about assisted suicide is crucially important. This is a free democratic society and those who wish to see a change in the law are fully entitled to express their views in the public square. Furthermore it is to be expected that private media outlets will want to pursue a specific editorial line.

But with an issue as important as this one, campaigners should not have the added advantage of being able to spread their propaganda by using the publicly funded national broadcasting corporation effectively as a private public relations company and press office.

If you want to know about advances in the treatment of spinal cord injury don’t read any British newspaper or ask the BBC

Reading the reports about the new embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury that have been all over the BBC and the British papers today I am struggling to know what all the fuss is about and why in fact it is even news at all.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is causing such excitement for five main reasons:

1.Our media are obsessed with any story involving embryonic stem cells despite the fact that these entities have not yet provided any treatments for any human disease after more than ten years of hype (By contrast adult and umbilical stem cells have already provided treatments for over 80 diseases – see my Triple Helix review)

2.Because there is ethical controversy in their use (as harvesting them involves the destruction of human embryos) it provides an opportunity for the media to revive the myth that religious zealots are trying to hold back scientific advance and stop millions of people being cured from terrible diseases.

3.The science correspondents writing for our national newspapers seem not to read medical journals any more but simply regurgitate press releases produced by commercial companies (like Geron) who wish to promote their products and improve their public image.

4.Geron have lots of money (they have already spent $170m developing this ‘treatment’) and a very good PR machine.

5.British scientists are worried about research funding in the current economic climate and so are trying to attract public and media attention in the hope of attracting grants so they are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of gullible politicians and members of the public with exaggerated claims.

If you go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website which logs current clinical trials you will find there are 3,124 listings of trials involving adult stem cells and 141 involving umbilical stem cells. These therapies are increasingly well established and pose no ethical problems (and so are of little interest to the British media).

By contrast today’s story is of the first clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells after over a decade of breath-holding.

There are no results yet and no scientific papers yet published in any peer-reviewed journals.

Nor will you learn from any UK media outlet today that there have been clinical trials involving (adult) stem cell treatments for spinal cord injury going on for some years now.

This story seems to be in the news simply because Geron have decided to announce to the world that they have started a clinical trial involving a possible future treatment that has not yet (and may well never) actually deliver.

Just over a week ago I blogged about a new advance in stem cell technology - involving a new improved method of producing induced pluri-potent stem cells (iPs) from ethically harvested adult cells - that led to over 1,400 headlines worldwide.

The British press has to my knowledge still not noticed it – presumably because it did not come packaged in easy cut and paste format from a biotechnology company with a financial vested interest.

For those who are interested in reading a more balanced overview of the research currently going on into stem cell treatments for spinal cord injury in different centres around the world - and about the relative merits of the several different kinds of adult and umbilical stem cells that have been used in animal experiments, or are currently being used in human trials - I would recommend, for starters, the following review articles freely available on the internet.

1.Challenges of Stem Cell Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury: Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Endogenous Neural Stem Cells, or Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells?

2.Stem cell-based therapies for spinal cord injury.

3.Stem and progenitor cell therapies: recent progress for spinal cord injury repair

And if you would to know more about all the varied avenues of work in which researchers are involved in trying to develop treatments for spinal cord injury then try typing the words ‘spinal cord injury’ into the search box here.

When I checked there were 304 clinical trials listed – with only one (today’s story) involving embryonic stem cells!