If you missed Panorama this week – ‘Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed’ – take advantage of iPlayer as soon as you can and watch it. This is professional reporting at its best.
No unadulterated nonsense about celebrities breaking fingernails or mindless gossip about the sex lives of people we don’t know. This was a report showing up callous monsters abusing vulnerable and ill people; about professional bodies failing to monitor their own, even after being warned by a whistle-blower. And it showed what happens when greedy companies are given unfettered access to taxpayers’ money.
There have been questions asking why the reporter involved continued to film undercover for five weeks without intervening. The producers point out that the reporter’s job is not to fix the problem, but to obtain evidence.
From a journalistic viewpoint, the job as carried out is well summed up by this viewer comment on the BBC website:
“If I don’t watch any more TV this year I will feel that, for once, my TV license fee was justified. It’s just a shame that it needed the BBC to intervene and for the parents to have to witness these scenes before action was taken. Well done [whistle-blower] Terry Bryan and the BBC in helping bring these people to account.”
Couldn’t put it better than that.
