The BBC have decided that President Obama isn't sufficiently proactive on their pet topic, Global Warming.
You can see their point, I suppose. They go to all the trouble of carefully selecting statistics to help us understand what they want us to understand, of making sure that every single presenter on every single wildlife and environment programme gets a dig in about Global Warming and the way we're all ruining the planet and practically every single species of animal, bird, fish, tree, plant, insect and microbe is "under threat" … and the New Messiah over there in La La Land lets them down by making an inaugural speech that just glosses over it.
It wasn't a bad speech, as inaugural speeches go. The man's more of an orator than almost any British politician in recent years, and speaks fluent English which is more than you can say for any recent American President. But oh dear, where were the polar bears? Where was the perilously shrinking polar ice? Where was the surging sea-level threatening low-lying areas of Nepal? Where was the CO2 that chokes us, where was the panic, where was the guilt?
It must have been dreadfully disappointing for the BBC.
So they decided to do something about it. They lied.
On Newsnight, reporter Susan Watts introduced a piece about the implications of the speech for Global Warming. We heard the new President say "We will restore science to its rightful place," [and] "roll back the spectre of a warming planet. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories."
You can hear him saying it here.
Jolly good. Susan Watts was ecstatic: "President Obama couldn't have been clearer today", she said, "and for most scientists his vote of confidence would not have come a moment too soon. In the eight years of the Bush presidency, the world saw Arctic ice caps shrink to a record summer low, the relentless rise of greenhouse gas emissions, and warnings from scientists shift from urgent to panicky".
Let's not be picky and small-minded. Let's stick to the big issue. We'll leave aside the fact that the record summer low is not exactly a very long-standing record: in the 1890s the limits of the pack ice were a full 100 miles nearer the Pole than they are now. We won't cavil over the scientists' warnings which, far from becoming panicky, are increasingly sounding a note of caution with a steady erosion in the support the IPCC is finding in the scientific community - or, to put it crudely, more and more scientists are coming out of the woodwork and saying it's all a load of b*ll*cks.
No, let's just keep it simple. You see, Obama actually said nothing of the sort. The BBC had taken sentences from his speech and, as it were, photo-shopped them into a different order for their own biased purposes.
What the President actually said was "For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do."
Fair enough. Nothing wrong with looking for alternative energy sources. America doesn't want to be dependent on the Middle East or Russia for its energy a moment more than it has to. But no mention of Global Warming, you notice. So where did that come from?
Well, it turned up six whole paragraphs later: "We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the spectre of a warming planet. We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."
Even then, he may not have been talking about Global Warming at all, not in the way Susan Watts wanted. He might have meant "we'll lessen the nuclear threat, and while we're at it we'll sack all the panic-mongers and global alarmists making a profit out of myths and childish fear". The next sentence, "we will not apologise for our way of life", doesn't sound as though he's about to ban gas-guzzlers and close down the whole of Pittsburgh, does it?
There was just one other phrase that may or may not have referred to Global Warming, in the fourth paragraph: "each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet". In other words, our dependence on oil puts us in the hands of our enemies, and if that doesn't threaten the peace and stability of the planet, what does?
No, there's no getting round it: the man's a serious disappointment to the left-wing propagandists of the BBC, so they took appropriate action. And they assumed we're all so stupid that nobody would know. Nothing new there, then.
Luckily for us, there are some pretty bright people out there. We are all indebted to TonyN of the very intelligent Harmless Sky website, who spotted the deception and publicised it. And he wrote to the BBC to complain, and what's more, he got a reply. Peter Rippon, the Editor of Newsnight, said: "We did edit sections of the speech to reflect the elements in it that referred to Science. The aim was to give people an impression or montage of what Obama said about science in his inauguration speech. This was signposted to audiences with fades between each point. It in no way altered the meaning or misrepresented what the President was saying."
Which is fine, except that, as you will have heard if you followed the link above, it wasn't signposted to audiences with fades, because there were no fades. Or at least, not to our ears. Perhaps they were some sort of subtle and highly technical fade only apparent to the trained ear of someone at the BBC, like those whistles only dogs and Anneka Rice can hear?
And as for altering the meaning or misrepresenting what the President said, well, that's exactly what it did, and what it was intended to do. If the President says nothing in support of Global Warming alarm, and you alter his speech so it sounds as though he did, that is just a teeny weeny bit misleading, isn't it?
You see how it's done? If you're caught out in a lie, simply tell another one. Just lie, and lie, and lie through your teeth until your opponents either wilt and give in, or get bored and go away, or die. After all, that's what we pay our licence fees for, isn't it? So that the wise, all-knowing BBC can tell us what to think and save us the trouble of trying to do it for ourselves?
As my old uncle used to say, "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts".
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