Gripped by the overpowering of printed and digital news the BBC, and its own standards have been reduced to a more radical version of an organisation once noted worldwide as a reliable source of news worldwide. Sadly those days are long gone and the corporation are receiving record numbers of complaints from all angles now, mostly rejected by their own inflexible 'complaints' process.

The BBC raised a question about the cause of the current Junior Doctors strike in the manner media likes to frequently use by asking themselves a question - which is automatically followed by the pre-conceived answer they used to deliver the answer at the heart of their article.

By phrasing the question “How did we get here?”, which conveniently suited the purpose of the question, which was to load responsibility on to the Labour government since coming to power.

Unfortunately the 'horse had bolted' on this approach to the constructed blame-game when they publicly inadvertently stated that going back more than the 2+ years since Labour came to power in any references to 'what went wrong' was tantamount to "going down memory lane".

Students of media and media studies would have no difficulty in explaining quite simply that the BBC were effectively using a self imposed 'moratorium' on anything prior to a certain date in time - namely the 14 year period between 2010 and 2024 of the Conservative government.

So, in order to assist the BBC in answering their own question, the largest single reason why this is a crisis today is almost entirely due to the following actions taken by that Conservative government throughout that entire 14 year period - not considered in the BBC's clear biased right wing style analysis.

14 years of below-inflation NHS pay settlements.

A pay freeze, then a pay cap, then real-terms erosion year after year.

A political decision that created the crisis.

Without that context, the BBC’s framing becomes:

Doctors are striking despite generous pay rises.”

But the real story is:

Doctors are striking because their pay has been systematically eroded for over a decade.

This isn’t a minor omission — it’s the heart of the issue.

THE MISSING 14 YEARS

From 2010 to 2024:

NHS staff were hit with a pay freeze

then a 1% cap

then repeated below-inflation rises

while workload, demand, and vacancies soared

Even using CPI (not RPI), junior doctors’ real-terms pay has fallen significantly. This is not a dispute about this year’s 3.5%. It’s about 14 years of political decisions.

Yet the BBC’s “How did we get here?” section doesn’t mention any of this. Not one line.

WHY THIS FRAMING MATTERS

When you remove the political origin of the crisis, the public is left with a distorted picture:

Government = generous

Doctors = unreasonable

Dispute = technical disagreement about inflation

But when you restore the missing context, the picture changes:

Government = architect of long-term pay erosion

Doctors = responding to a decade of cuts

Dispute = structural, not sudden

The BBC’s omission shapes public understanding — and not in a neutral way.

THE PUBLIC DESERVES THE FULL STORY

If the BBC is going to ask, “How did we get here?”, they need to include the answer: