Media Bias

 

BBC to air documentary of man killing himself at Swizz suicide clinic

By Dave Andrusko
The BBC, whose support for euthanasia and assisted suicide knows no bounds, has announced that it will air a documentary that shows businessman Simon Binner talking his own life last October.
“How to Die: Simon’s Choice” shows Binner lying on a bed before opening a valve that allows a lethal drug to enter his body. “It will be the first time footage from inside Switzerland’s second largest assisted suicide clinic will be shown on British television,” the Christian Institute reported. “Pro-life campaigners have criticised the BBC for being a ‘cheerleader for suicide.’”
From the Daily Telegraph, the BBC announced

that it is to air scenes showing a British businessman taking his own life at a Swiss suicide clinic.

The corporation said yesterday that it will screen a 90-minute documentary following the declining health of Simon Binner, a Cambridge graduate who suffered from motor neurone disease, and his eventual decision to kill himself, on October 19 last year.

Mr. Binner, who was diagnosed with the degenerative disease in January 2015, made headlines after he announced on LinkedIn that he planned to end his life at the Eternal Spirit clinic, in Basel [Switzerland].

Apparently, according to media correspondent Patrick Foster, while the BBC drew the line at actually showing the 57-year-old Binner at the moment of his death, “there is a fleeting glimpse of Mr. Binner’s dead body, as his friends and family sit weeping. The camera then cuts to the lid of his coffin being screwed down.”

The BBC bills the documentary as a “sensitive observational documentary following one family’s experience of assisted death”.
But Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for Care Not Killing, said: “We are deeply disturbed by this. This has the capacity to encourage others to take their own lives.”
The criticisms are based on a preview version of the 90 minute BBC documentary, which will air on February 10.

The backdrop for “How to Die: Simon’s Choice” was last year’s House of Commons debate in which Members of Parliament overwhelmingly rejected a bill to legalize assisted suicide.
According to the Christian Institute

In 2014, the BBC was criticised for ‘gradually normalising’ assisted suicide, after it broadcast a television drama featuring the story of a pregnant woman who agreed to prepare lethal drugs for her ill mother.

A critic said that it was never once mentioned that assisted suicide is against the law, and the programme failed to consider the consequences of helping someone to kill themselves.

The BBC was previously accused of cheerleading for assisted suicide in 2011, by airing a documentary showing another person with motor neurone disease getting help to kill themselves.

Source: Media Bias