Please see an earlier post for discussion of the problems with the MoD’s approach.

The title Betrayed? An Investigation comes from a soldier interviewed by ITV News reporter Emma Murphy. Emma’s package features an extended interview with an unidentified wounded soldier. The two quotes from the soldier (reproduced on the ITV News website) explain that he feels “a bit betrayed,” and that wounded service personnel “have been betrayed by the army in the way that we’re not on a military ward…” So the ‘betrayed’ tag is uncomfortable, but it is justified, although it’s the army, rather than the Government that the interviewee blames. It’s left to viewers to decide from that interview and the week’s other reports by Paul Davies, and guest presenter Simon Weston, if the question in the investigation’s title is answered.

I should make it clear that Emma once worked for me, and I have a great deal of respect for her journalism. What follows below is the pernickety dissection of someone who now teaches, rather than does.

The opening to Emma’s piece seems to have particularly angered James Clark and his colleagues at the MoD. Here’s how her script opens:

[Pictures: Plane touches down in darkness, unidentifiable stretcher is removed from plane] Flown back under the cover of darkness, without ceremony or celebration, this is how Britain’s injured war heroes come home, to the cargo section of Birmingham airport. They’re the homecomings the Government would rather you didn’t see, filmed in secret at one a.m. in the morning. This casualty, injured in Afghanistan was bound not for a specialist hospital, but for a general ward, where battle-hardened soldiers and civilians are treated side by side.

[Pictures: Murphy PTC] Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken to a host of people who feel that civilian hospitals are not the place to treat military casualties. Tonight for the first time, a soldier who was injured and treated here at Selly Oak in Birmingham has spoken out and told us that he feels betrayed by the Government.

So the intro is a little over-cooked. If you are on a stretcher being transferred between hospitals, it is highly unlikely that you would want to interrupt the process for a bugle call and some party balloons, and even less likely that doctors would recommend it. The outcry over the MoD imposing ‘Welcome Home’ receptions on badly wounded military casualties would doubtless be considerable! A similar effect could have been achieved with less purpling of the prose.

In order to facilitate such filming the MoD would have to get permission from the wounded soldiers themselves. If the Mod refused to ask service personnel then you could argue that the Govt really doesn’t want people to see these ‘homecomings.’ If it tried and failed to get permission, then that’s a little unfair.

My real problem as a viewer is with the story: Emma’s interview highlights a general failure in NHS care – grouping people together with no privacy in situations of distress. When her interviewee refers disparagingly to “old women,” is he really implying that they are entitled to a lower level of care than injured servicemen?

Hospitals that are apparently unsuitable for military casualties, are perfectly suitable for firefighters, police officers and paramedics injured in the line of duty, who might also be experiencing trauma relating to the circumstances of their injuries.

But guess what? I was able to come to that conclusion by myself, just by watching the news.

And we are only able to have this debate here in the UK because our TV news is regulated for fairness. A newspaper would likely take less care over its terminology and reporting.