Today is the first day of nurse strikes, the first nationwide action in the Royal College of Nursing’s 106-year history. Given the appalling state of NHS services anyway, it’s possible patients won’t actually notice the walk-out. Today’s Mirror front page carries the screeching, virtue-signalling splash of “WE ARE WITH YOU.”
NHS workers subscribed to the paper should take that with a pinch of salt, however. As all Daily Mirror jobs make clear, company perks include:
“Private Healthcare Cash Plan – free health cash plan so you can claim back cash for a range of medical expenses.”
Guido hopes BUPA has sufficient supplies of today’s Mirror in their waiting rooms…
For the second time in four days, a paper has managed to mix up bald white Tory minister Andrew Griffith with bald, white, Tory secretary of state Ben Wallace. First it was the Sunday Mail, now it’s the Mirror…
The Mirror also managed to confuse Kwasi Kwarteng with the president of international for Bank of America earlier this month. Hard lessons obviously learnt. Picture desks: catch up…
UPDATE: Griffith responds: “We really must stop going to the same hairdresser!”
Late last night, the Reach PLC union members paused today’s planned strike over pay. Express and Mirror hacks were set to walk out today, Wednesday 31 and 14–15 September after Reach offered staff a mere 3% or £750 pay rise. The National Union of Journalists announced last minute today’s strike has now been suspended…
The pause came as the union announced talks had been resumed with Reach “with a view to reaching a fair and acceptable settlement for all of our hardworking members.” The rest of the strike days remain in place…
The remaining three strike days and period of working to rule remains in place and will be active should the negotiations over the Bank Holiday weekend not yield any meaningful proposals from the company.
— Mirror NUJ Chapel (@MirrorNUJ) August 25, 2022
The continued threat of Express strikes is bad news for anyone who likes reading regurgitated Guido articles hours after they’re published here…
Top vaccine scientist and member of the government’s vaccine committee, Adam Finn, has diplomatically condemned the British Medical Association for their anti-scientific scaremongering over the government’s single vaccine dose policy. Responding to last week’s warning by the BMA that the 12-week gap between doses is “difficult to justify”, Finn told the Today programme:
“I must be careful what I say about the BMA but I would, I suppose, say that it would be a good idea to really understand the issues before making public pronouncements.”
His condemnation of fear-mongering also extended to the Mirror Group’s Sunday People for misleading readers over their editorial “Boris Johnson gambles with lives by ignoring vaccine science”:
Nick Robinson: “Over the weekend some newspapers – the People, the Mirror and others – were suggesting that the government was going against the science in this in order to get more first doses into people and make the figures look better, actually in a sense am I rightly understanding you’re saying the opposite; the science is actually what the government seems to be following?”
Finn: “Yes, absolutely, and I think people are being misled in the sense that it’s half the story, this absence of evidence story ignores the fact that there’s absolutely rock-solid evidence that if you give a dose of the vaccine to more people you give them protection and save lives. There’s no real question about that.”
How many times throughout this crisis has the Mirror attacked the government for supposedly not following the science?
Readers have been getting in touch to tell us they have been complaining to IPSO about the Sunday Mirror’s false claim that Dominic Cummings made a second visit to Durham. They put the story on their front page apparently based on a single anonymous source. IPSO’s complaint form is here.
Yesterday the Mirror claimed Boris Johnson had a “death plan” to kill school children by forcing them back to school in June. It goes without saying there is no such plan and all the medical research suggests children are thankfully almost immune from this terrible virus. Last month they claimed that 50,000 people were set to die on Easter Sunday. The actual number who sadly died on Easter Sunday was in the hundreds. Not tens of thousands. There is tabloid sensationalism and there is absolutely disgraceful scaremongering.
There is a lot of hand wringing punditry about fake news being spread on social media by the likes of David Icke. Here’s two examples of fake news being spread by the traditional dead tree press…
