Here’s how the exercise went. Headlines were cut from the tabloids and the students received the stories only. Their task was to guess the headline.
One was from yesterday’s edition of The Sun. The winner of that story held a scrap of newsprint. A common tabloid technique: massive headline boxing in 100 or so small words.
The story concerned Donald Trump arriving in Britain to say he was not interested in the NHS, even if it was handed to him “on a silver platter”. He also said he had no idea where the idea of him wanting a bite of the NHS had come from.
Sometimes you can scratch your head till it bleeds in this world. Who did say that? Ahem, Donald Trump on his last trip here in June. Asked about possible post-Brexit trade deals with the US, he said the NHS would form part of any negotiations – “When you’re dealing in trade, everything is on the table.”
Do we believe June Trump or December Trump, or all those other Trumps in between, spouting off assorted wild contradictions? And did The Sun’s snipped-out headline acknowledge such Trumpian inconsistency? Don’t be silly.
The Sun said Trump’s comments crushed a main election claim by Jeremy Corbyn that the NHS was being privatised – “Trump thumps chump over NHS lies”, its headline shouted.
The students weren’t impressed, with one saying (unprompted): “The Sun – isn’t that the one you’re not supposed to read?”
Many newspapers remain blatantly biased against Labour. The Telegraph and the Express also led with that Boris-supporting story. The Guardian and the i-newspaper allowed Labour’s side of the argument on their front pages.
If you dip your head in the Twitter stream, you will see plenty of comment about the horrible newspapers – occasionally of the “come the revolution” ilk, promising the evil press will be shut down.
As someone who’s idly watched politics for years, I’d say Corbyn suffers the roughest treatment of any Labour leader since Neil Kinnock.
Set against that is the rapid fall in newspaper sales and influence since those Kinnock-bashing days. The papers are still powerful, but their might has diminished; the arrival of social media and blogging creates other platforms for pro-Labour opinions (and all variety of opinions).
The argument about the NHS being at threat won’t go away. After all, this has been a favourite Labour scare story for years, and not without reason. Its potency can be seen in Boris Johnson’s hot denials and his invention of 40 new hospitals, all designed to park himself on Labour’s lawn.
In a sense, though, both arguments miss the point, as a report by Tamasin Cave on the Open Democracy website makes clear. Privatisation by stealth has been going on for years, as we know – just ask Richard Branson. His Virgin company won £2bn worth of NHS contracts in the two years up to August 2018 (according to a Guardian report in that month).
Both sides know this, but what’s different in the Open Democracy report is the line that US private healthcare firm Optum has been ‘planting seeds’ in our NHS for a decade.
The report points to meetings between our government officials and representatives of US healthcare companies. The paragraph below tells most of what you need to know…
“The secrecy of these trans-Atlantic meetings matters. It has allowed the UK government to tell one story to the public, while quietly inviting a giant, for-profit US corporation, bent on overseas expansion, to embed itself in our NHS.”
Of course, you can always believe that headline in The Sun, if you wish. You could always believe Johnson and Trump, both so well known for never staining the truth.
Or you could listen to your doctor and all those other doctors.