MEDIA WATCH

Last week's Department of Health announcement that signalled the biggest re-organisation of the NHS for two years received patchy coverage, and a wide range of angles.

When a DoH announcement is given official gloss by way of a press conference, Fleet Street's finest are usually to be found in a huddle afterwards, agreeing a line and checking quotes: hence fairly similar stories the following day.

Because the future of primary care trusts was, as the Sunday Express's political editor had it, 'slipped out a week after parliament was suspended', this safetyin-journalism-bynumbers approach was denied them.

You could almost hear the collective headscratching. In the end the Sunday Express ran with the angle that the re-jig 'will cost taxpayers millions in redundancy pay-offs and pension deals for managers who lose their jobs'.

As always, such is the level of media hostility to NHS managers, it seems any government could be forgiven for concluding they are damned if they keep managers (newspaper view: NHS millions spent on pen-pushers at expense of patient care) and damned if they try to cut levels of 'bureaucracy' (NHS fatcats get huge payoffs at expense of patient care).

Meanwhile, Cambridge University Hospitals foundation trust found itself on the receiving end of silly season ire after it placed an ad for a£36,937 a year (pro rata for 18.5 hours a week) art curator. The Times and the Sunday Express hit out at the move in lead-length stories, quoting patient 'anger' that the trust was not using the money for more cleaners after its MRSA rates contributed to its loss of a star. Readers would also be presumably outraged until, near the end of both stories, they read that the trust had been allocated the money from charities specifically for the art curator post, and could not, in fact, spend the money on improving cleanliness.