Heart strain
THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY
My heart's in the Highlands, I'm glad to say, and I have absolutely no intention of re- vealing its exact whereabouts to anybody, and least of all to that razor-sharp, quick- on-the-draw bunch of eager beavers down at Guy's Hospital. I mean, you never know the minute these days, do you?
have caught this mood of edgy sus- piciousness from the papers. Right from the middle of last week, when the story of the unfortunate Miss Sinsbury began to emerge, bit by bit, the papers have been worried. Huge front page splashes, probing features, high-toned leading articles, and cut-by-cut accounts of what's been going on at Guy's, all showing just how worried the word- smiths were. Is their concern justified, or are they once again going over the top, sen- sationalising a serious issue?
I wish I knew. But what I do know is that I have a sneaky suspicion that the papers are at it again. By all means let them ask questions about that last moment of mortality when we leave life. By all means let leader writers weigh 'on-the-one- hand progress' against 'on-the-other-hand the sanctity of human life' in their impar- tial way (perhaps not as impartial as usual 'Rather sad news I'm afraid Mr and Mrs Smith: parts of your son are dead' since it may have crossed their minds that, such are the strains of their job, they may actually want to be on the receiving end of
a transplant one of these days). But let them remember that their thoughts, unlike those
of The Great Chairman, are unlikely to prove any help at all to doctors wondering if someone is dead, and others wanting to keep someone alive.
Of course the vast coverage received by the case of Sinsbury v. Hendricks is under- standable. The question is—is it helpful?
And as I have already indicated, I have a feeling that it isn't. The feeling became a conviction on Saturday when the Daily Express splashed all over its front page a story about 'A life they might have switched off'. The story told of a case superficially similar to the Sinsbury one where the girl is now alive and leads 'almost a normal existence'. The quote is from a letter from the mother which was part of the Express's front-page treatment of the story.
To be fair to the Express, the report, by Arliss Rhind and Philip Finn, did contain evidence that the huge headline might be misleading. A senior surgeon at the hospital where the girl was taken—it happened eighteen months ago—is reported as telling the Express: 'It is untrue to say that the girl had irreversible brain damage. There was never any question among the consultant, that anyone was going to "turn off the tap". At no stage was it ever considered resusci- tation be terminated'. A little further on is another significant sentence: 'Whether Mrs CZ) X [the girl's mother] misunderstood the situation or not....' It seems entirely pos- sible that she did. For what she had to com- prehend, at a time when she was naturally suffering from severe emotional upset, was the difference between using a machine to keep the heart going because without it it xe'ould stop (Miss Sinsbury's case, appar- ently); and using a machine to keep the heart going after the administration of cer- tain paralysing drugs employed as part of the treatment (Miss Cox's case).
It was, as I say, natural that this differ- ence may have escaped Mrs Cox, prompting her to see a similarity between her daughter and Miss Sinsbury that wasn't really there. I am not sure that it was natural for it to escape the Daily Express and lead it to the great splashing of the story which they indulged in on Saturday.
On the other hand, I'm sure it was entirely natural of the Express to realise that, since they alone had received the letter from Mrs Cox, they had something of a scoop on their hands and a scoop that seemed to have a lot of relevance to the story all the papers had been leading on for days.
But it does bring up the question of whether a popular paper can ever avoid falling into this trap of always seeing things as 'a good story'. Most of the papers did seem to me to have fallen into it last week. To their credit they now appear to have realised it, and, in climbing out, are bringing something useful with them. For by Monday all were admitting that though the Sinsbury case looked a most curious one, it did so merely because new things are happening which require new rules drawing up. We have not, as the Sketch said 'kept pace with the pioneers of transplant surgery'. A new code is needed; so say all the papers. Had there been one already in existence, it seems likely we would have been spared some of the horrors of what the Sunday Times called 'this sadly emotive week.' And if the later attitudes of the press do result in the .drawing up of such a code, then I think
they can be forgiven the near-hysteria with which many of them treated the affair in the beginning.
A journalist friend of mine once said to me, 'If your news editor is an intellectual. get rid of him. It's emotion he needs, not intellect'. Maybe. But perhaps this week it might have bcen better if, in the words of the Observer, we had had 'More head, less heart'.
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