What a bizarre, sad twist to the controversy over the death of Alzheimer's victim Malcolm Pointon! Last weekend the media was full of arguments about the rightness or otherwise of the poor chap's passing away after years of decline being screened in an ITV documentary.

His widow took part in broadcasts and gave newspaper interviews justifying allowing filmmaker Paul Watson to capture the former musician's moment of death at the age of 66 after enduring a 17-year decline.

The watchdog group Mediawatch UK raised serious concerns about the ethics of turning such a private moment into prime-time television. ITV defended its decision to schedule the programme for screening next Wednesday.

Everyone, it seems, had an opinion about it. Some declared they would never watch anything like that. Others agreed with Mrs Pointon that it was important to follow such an important story through to its ultimate conclusion, however harrowing it might be.

But now, it seems, all the heated moral debate was misdirected. The film does not after all show Mr Pointon dying. It shows him lapsing into unconsciousness. His death followed three days later. Once again television has been found to be dealing in its own rather bendy version of the truth - though probably in this case with the best of motives.

Quite why Mrs Pointon was persuaded to go along with this sleight of hand isn't clear, although she has said that she considers the moment when her husband lost consciousness to be the moment when he died. Does she though? Or is that what she was persuaded to believe?

What is certain, sadly, is that attention will have been deflected from the power of the programme to portray the terrible devastation that can be caused by Alzheimer's, a disease which blights so many families. And once again the integrity of television has suffered a major blow, possibly this time a mortal one.

It used to be said, and probably still is, by the cynics that you couldn't believe a word you read in the newspapers. That was a sweeping and unjust generalisation. You couldn't (and still can't) believe all the words you read in some newspapers, but the rest are damned by association.

Most newspapers and their employees still strive to present the truth to their readers. And so too, I'm sure, do many broadcast journalists and film-makers.

Tragically, though, the culture in which they have to work appears to be seriously tainted, with fraud and fakery being used to push up ratings. As a result, it's now widely being claimed that you can't trust anything you see on television.

In a country in which so much is wrong, in which the official political Opposition presents such a feeble challenge to government policies, we need a strong and respected media that the public can trust to tell it the truth. That is vital.

Every cheat exposed, every fraud eventually admitted to, undermines that trust. And in doing so it undermines the increasingly fragile democracy on which the freedoms we take for granted depend.

Stop passing the buck

Care homes and councils fall out over how much it costs to look after the elderly, with the former demanding more and the latter saying they can't afford it because the Government doesn't allow them enough to meet increasing care costs.

Meanwhile a woman of 84, an age at which many feel the need to take it easy and be looked after, is forced to go into battle on behalf of her 103-year-old mother who is threatened with eviction from the home where she lives unless she pays an extra £125 a week fees.

That threat was later withdrawn after ministerial intervention, but isn't the whole situation just typical of the appalling way older people are treated in this country. The problems of an ageing population aren't going to go away. They're on the increase.

A fair, compassionate way of coping with them needs to be worked out and costed and funded properly. The present buckpassing chaos is far too distressing to too many people and mustn't be allowed to continue.

Our limp-a-long NHS

Who on earth is responsible for the chaos over the Medical Training Application Service which has led to 16,000 junior doctors failing to find posts in the UK, 1,000 posts remaining unfilled, and 30,000 junior doctors all changing or starting jobs on the same day rather than the process being staggered throughout the year?

Once again the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere. No blame ever seems to be apportioned. No heads roll. One of the most important of public services, in fact probably THE most important one, is left once again to lumber on towards the next costly crisis.

What a way to run a health service!

The man who let the dogs out

Who would ever have thought that a television programme featuring sheepdogs would have run for 23 years and at its peak attracted more than eight million viewers? Certainly not Phil Drabble, right, who presented One Man and His Dog for 17 of those years and died this week aged 93.

"When the BBC first asked me to present the programme I refused because I thought it would be too boring for words," he was reported as saying when he retired from it in 1993.

That it turned out to be far from boring owed a lot to his own forthright personality. But it also caught the imagination of a viewing public which has always had an appetite for eccentric, innocent little programmes like this one. Witness the ongoing popularity of Gardeners' World and Antiques Roadshow.

It arrived on the scene at the right time though. Bet you that if someone was to have put forward at a BBC planning meeting in 2007 the idea of a programme in which dogs chased sheep into pens while their minder whistled commands, it would have met with universal ridicule and never got off the ground.