Yesterday, I wrote of how the BBC is rapidly losing trust among large sectors of the population including the middle aged and elderly, those who supported Brexit and those from outside London and the South East. This particular story shows just why the BBC is no longer trusted by many of us.

On New Years Day there was a report carried by the BBC and fronted by one of their presenters, Adrian Chiles. He interviewed a person whom the BBC alleged was a matron at a London hospital and therefore not at all political. This Matron made the claim that there were ‘wards full’ of paediatric covid patients. The BBC apparently made no effort to check this claim and allowed it to be broadcast as if it was the certified truth.

This claim was very quickly challenged the following day by a statement from Professor Russell Viner, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health which said that he is not aware of any significant extra pressure on paediatric wards from covid. According to a linked BBC article on the Samizdata site, Professor Viner’s view was backed up by a number of other senior medical figures. They all said that there were not ‘wards full’ of paediatric covid patients.

Because of the backlash over the BBC’s dishonesty and gross lack of fact checking when interviewing the Matron, Laura Duffel, who according to the Daily Mail is an activist allegedly ‘fighting for nurses’, the BBC had to issue a correction to the story. The BBC had to publish a story retracting their original one, which had no doubt unnecessarily scared many parents. The original story presented by Adrian Chiles is either an episode of gross journalistic incompetence because of their failure to check Ms Duffel’s claims or verify any data, or a deliberate attempt to scare the public without good reason?

Many will suspect that the lockdown loving left which now dominates the BBC deliberately or carelessly allowed false and misleading information as fact in order to keep the public unduly frightened and what’s worse frightened for their children. It’s quite possible that there are elements within BBC News that suspected that these claims by Ms Duffel were inaccurate and possibly dishonest, but broadcast them anyway and just arrogantly hoped that people would not notice. Sadly for the BBC, a lot of people did notice this gross inaccuracy and kicked up a big fuss about it.

It is incidents like this, one of many over the last decade or so, that have caused a massive drop in trust in the BBC and in my view that lack of trust in this broadcaster is deserved. After this false story scandal more people will start to question not just why the BBC allowed this false story to go out but also ask just what else has the BBC been lying to the British public about?