GOS has made at least five formal complaints to the BBC over the last three years, alleging that the BBC is ignoring its responsibility for balanced reporting. The most recent example was when a programme about scientists' predictions gave full credence to the forecasts of Paul Ehrlich, the completely discredited so-called “scientist”.
The reason he is discredited is that he's a total fruit-loop who in the 1970s claimed that by the end of the 20th Century India would have ceased to exist as a nation, millions of Americans would have starved, England would have been reduced to barbarism through lack of food, and the oceans of the world would be completely devoid of life so that it would be impossible to approach the coasts for the stench of rotting fish. Not someone on whom to rely, then, but this fact seems to have escaped the BBC. When The GOS pointed this out to them, they thanked him for his comment and then ignored what he'd said, as it didn't fit in with their own distorted world-view.
Even the most gullible of TV viewers are now becoming tired of the constant reiteration of threat. Not a wild-life programme is screened these days that does not include warnings that this or that life-form is in imminent danger of extinction because of global warming, with the implicit suggestion that it's our fault and we ought to do something about it, though they usually stop short of saying what can actually be done by the average man in the street about some insignificant little rat in the deepest jungles of Venezuela.
Now it's been revealed by The Spectator just why the BBC are so biased. It seems they don't take seriously their obligation for balanced reporting, but actually have “a policy” on climate change – in other words, they aren't just reporting, they've made their minds up and are busily propagandising ...
Revealed: who decides the BBC’s climate change policy
by Sebastian Payne
Just when you thought the BBC had no more scandals, Guido Fawkes has revealed what the Beeb tried very hard to cover up: the 28 mysterious individuals who have been informing its climate change reporting policy. As a state-funded broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide balance. It rejected this on its environmental coverage after taking advice from people in a now-infamous 2006 seminar from people whose identity the BBC was keen to keep secret.
I wrote on Sunday how it had refused FoI requests to reveal those names. But Maurizio Morabito has revealed a list which the BBC cannot describe as a bunch of dispassionate scientists: it’s a veritable who’s who of the green lobby:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED?Poshendra
Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
Handpicking this selected group to decide an important policy is certainly not the best way to provide balanced reporting. Had the BBC decided any other major editorial matter on the advice of special interest groups, there would have been outrage because it is the very opposite of what public sector broadcasting ought to be about.
Remember, the BBC had claimed to have “held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus” on anthropogenic climate change. So now we know the names of these “best scientific experts”, the remaining question is: why did the BBC feel it was so important to cover the identities up? Their official explanation — protecting journalistic sources — simply does not stand up.
The GOS says: That's a very telling little phrase, isn't it, “the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus”? You know and I know that there is no “consensus” - the vast majority of scientists (as opposed to mere environmental campaigners with no discernible expertise in climate science) are certainly not of one mind, and many are not committed to the idea that mankind is causing climate change.
But what the hell, say the BBC. If we keep banging on about this so-called consensus long enough, sooner or later people will start believing it's real, and then we can say what we like and we'll always be right. It's exactly the same technique used by bullies and despots since time immemorial. Our economy is in ruins? It must be the international Jewish conspiracy, said Hitler. There was no conspiracy, of course, but a whole nation believed it. One prominent political figure (Alger Hiss) has been exposed as a communist spy? There must be hundreds of them, and we need to root them out, said Senator McCarthy. There weren't hundreds of communists, and what's more McCarthy could never remember from one day to the next exactly how many he was claiming there were, but he went from relative obscurity to being the most powerful man in America almost overnight.
And we're still at it, of course. Jimmy Saville turns out to have been a paedophile? Well, naturally the BBC must have been riddled with them, and if the BBC was riddled then so must all the corridors of power have been – in fact, there was probably child abuse going on right in No.10 itself! Doesn't matter if it isn't true, doesn't even matter if it's patently absurd, just keep banging on about it and eventually it will become true.
Today (14th November) was the 90th birthday of BBC radio, so we've been hearing all day about what a jewel in our crown the BBC is, how influential, what a model for other countries, the world's benchmark for prompt, articulate, dispassionate and above all accurate reporting. Well, so it probably was for much of its life.
But now? Now it's all trendy limp-wristed left-wing liberal twaddle, artificial jeopardy, dreadful reality shows, soaps where everyone shouts all the time, and repeats of Outnumbered.
I wish someone could explain to me just what I'm paying the licence fee for. The only show I've consistently enjoyed in recent months has been Inspector Montalbano, and that's (a) Italian, (b) years old and (c) available on DVD anyway.
Oh, by the way, I would also like to know why the Church of England has a representative on that panel. There's nobody from the Druidical Church of Our Mother the Earth, or the Moonies or the Church of Christ Scientist or The Academy of Transcendental Meditation and Yogic Flying, so why does an organisation that consists of a few loony bishops and three old ladies in the congregation have the opportunity to tell the rest of us what to think about global warming? They've been trying to tell us what to think for the last two thousand years, and it hasn't taken yet.
P.S. In the Telegraph today (15th November), research by scientists (actual, proper scientists, that is, from universities - not just George Monbiot) indicates that increased temperatures are not having the effect on world-wide evaporation that climate models were predicting, and that we are not about to plunge into a cycle of droughts and famines. Needless to say, the BBC will not be reporting this story.
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