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David Knight: Get every version of the truth before making up your mind

Netflix has provided us with the Sussexes' 'truth', but it's still their version of the truth - minus any challenge or clarification, writes David Knight.

Recent Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan has caused a stir (Image: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock)
Recent Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan has caused a stir (Image: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock)

Netflix has provided us with the Sussexes’ ‘truth’, but it’s still their version of the truth – minus any challenge or clarification, writes David Knight.

I keep seeing a text from the NHS pop up on my mobile phone, asking me how I feel. I appreciate the thought.

I am quite well, actually, given my circumstances. Apart from at least one major organ, and a number of my very important nerves, which took fright during a cancer operation and never quite recovered.

So, it was a comfort to find myself back in the “pink zone” on floor five of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where they were taking another close look at me.

Appointments were being cancelled willy-nilly in England, but no strikes to get in my way in Scotland – yet.

Most of us agree that nurses are worth some kind of increase, but how much?

It’s just that I’m not sure whether paying nurses more means fewer patients on horrendous waiting lists. I doubt it, somehow.

But, it was reassuring that the NHS was still looking out for me while trying to solve side effects which have clung on stubbornly for more than four miserable years.

I smelled a rat

I was sitting in the fifth floor waiting room for an eye-watering procedure. I looked down at that text again. It was a little bit overfamiliar for my liking.

“NHS-COVIDScot: DAVID we’re interested in your health since your Covid-19 test.” It gave details of a website to visit where I could enter my “unique code”, which they kindly supplied.

What Covid test? My last official Covid test was ages ago. You know, the type of test which had to be supplied to the authorities under Covid law.

And that was in October 2021, when I returned from the Canaries, and we still had to fill in that dreadful passenger locator form, too.

Some Covid-related scams are more obvious than others (Image: Clokair/Shutterstock)

Why ask now? I smelled a rat.

Surely this was a con, just like all the other stuff that rains down on us from fraudsters?

I imagined what might happen if I tapped in my “unique code”; my piggy bank would be drained instantly.

I felt waves of warm self-satisfaction over my cleverness. But, just to be on the safe side, I rang Scotland’s NHS inform.

A nice call-handler thought it was a scam; he advised me to avoid this Covid message like the plague, so to speak.

In whom can we trust these days?

It pays to be cautious. In whom can we trust these days?

We trust the NHS. We trust The P&J, which still cherishes the honourable traditions of regional newspaper reporting.

We don’t trust the BBC as much, after the Jimmy Savile scandal, and the shocking revelations over Martin Bashir’s stitch-up of Princess Diana.

Fraudulent behaviour comes in all forms, and not only criminal. Being deliberately economical with the truth, for example.

My thoughts drifted down the Californian driveway leading to Harry and Meghan’s plush home – a million miles from our lives. You see, I’d just read a gossip magazine headline in the hospital shop: “Meghan’s last Christmas as duchess?”

A reference to rumours that the King might strip them of their titles; revenge served cold, as it’s known.

Only one version of the truth

Can we trust Netflix anymore, after it’s abomination of a “documentary”.

If a rich, privileged couple arrived at The P&J’s door and began spinning a yarn, two things would happen.

Non-British broadcasters transmitting into the UK could face the same strict rules as the British media over fairness and balance

The first would be a healthy dollop of journalistic sceptism, applied liberally to the allegations. Second, a lengthy process of double-checking to plug any unsubstantiated holes in the tale before publication, with as much balance as possible.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle,  following their wedding in 2018 (Image: Aaron Chown/PA)

So, we get the Sussexes’ “truth”, but it’s still their version of the truth – minus any challenge or clarification.

They failed to get their own way – to live “half-in, half-out” of the royal family when it suited them – and never got over it. Many think they should be taken down a peg or two.

Maybe they’ll see that, after reports that non-British broadcasters transmitting into the UK could face the same strict rules as the British media over fairness and balance.

Fines could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Let’s hope retrospective complaints and punishments are allowed.

‘We have to check for ourselves’

The irony, of course, was that, despite the Sussexes’ hatred for the media, they failed the most basic journalistic tests of accuracy and proof.

Scottish actor Mark Bonnar expounded the same principle in programme, Litvinenko, on STV.

Playing a top detective, when challenged about his obsession for corroborating Alexander Litvinenko’s account, he replied: “We can’t take what anyone says for granted. We have to check for ourselves… test it.”

My stream of thought in the hospital waiting room was broken, suddenly. A smiling nurse was beckoning me to a place where I would be attached to a machine.

I started to lose my nerve. I wished – fleetingly – that she had gone on strike after all.

Only joking, nurse. (I’m due to see her again, at another appointment in the New Year.)


David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal

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