In PMQs earlier today, Jeremy Corbyn asked a number of pertinent questions on the state of the NHS. He asked why patient waiting times had increased significantly after 10 years of a Tory government and referenced the shocking increase in A&E waiting times as well as a typical 2 month delay in cancer treatments. Among other things, Corbyn questioned why 2,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours for a bed only last month and he successfully deflected Johnson’s claims that the Tories were bringing in more nurses and building more hospitals by reminding him that his claims that the Conservatives would build 40 new hospitals had been proven to be false (only six have been proposed in reality) and 20,000 of the 50,000 new nurses figure has been proven to include existing NHS staff.
With so much content to choose from you’d think Sky had enough material to produce all manner of informative captions. Not so apparently! They had one, rather innocuous caption to cover Corbyn’s questions and counter arguments….
They also had just one caption to cover Johnson’s response to all of the critical questions posed by the Labour leader. You’ll notice that it’s deliberately short and blunt, doesn’t answer any of the questions and the text is significantly enlarged…
Now, if you were paying close attention, you might also have noticed another caption that flashed up for a split second and then was immediately replaced by the larger “WE WILL GET THOSE WAITING LISTS DOWN” caption instead…
Why would a caption editor make the decision to run with the larger, more punchy, bolder text for Johnson and the smaller tame, non-descript caption for Jeremy Corbyn?
Scroll back and watch it live on Sky News folks and then ask yourself two questions while you’re watching it…
1) How frequently did each captions pop up on screen
2) How long was each caption allowed to say up on the screen for.
I suspect you’ll come to the same conclusions I did but I’m happy to be proven wrong?
