I'm sorry BBC, but there is absolutely no excuse here. “Two-thirds of NHS and private hospitals are failing to meet the highest standards of cleanliness, snapshot inspections have revealed” will clearly be interpreted as “two thirds of NHS hospitals and two thirds of private hospitals” by the average reader. As this is a subtitle, it appears on the bbc news front page and is thus all many people will read. Why not just use ‘hospitals’? Because this doesn’t mislead and achieve the aims of the editor in the same way.
Posted by Alec Hodgson at December 15, 2005 11:03 AM
It's simply not good enough... Yet another example of either a biased-BBC or a very incompetent one. Has anyone else noticed the spelling/grammar on the BBC News site has worsened over the last few years?
They also have a tendency to refer to "jet crashes" even when the aircraft involved doesn't have a jet. This would suggest the incompetence theory over the prejudice theory... unless the BBC have it in for jet aircraft too? Mind you, that wouldn't surprise me either...
Posted by Rory at December 15, 2005 02:33 PM
Not only is it twisting, it doesn't make allowance for the tendency of regulatory bodies to be harder on Private institutions.
This might be the same bias, alternatively it might be the expectation that state provision is rubbish.
Posted by Paul at December 16, 2005 08:12 AM
BBC tries to imply that private hospitals have equally low standards of cleanliness as NHS ones.