HEAP OF S**T...
>> FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2010
The Guardian has been speculating whether the BBC's committment to reporting climate change is lessening. And earlier in the week, as I noted here, the Daily Telegraph suggested that new BBC editorial guidelines would force more balanced coverage of the topic. I have news for them both. Nothing has changed, and if anything the climate alarmist fervour is getting worse. The evidence? Yesterday, a reporter called Tom Heap presented a programme on Radio 4 in the Costing the Earth greenie strand called "Can Lawyers Save the World?". It is the most outstanding piece of partisan propaganda I have heard in 11 years of monitoring BBC output for a living. I urge you to listen to it, if you have the stomach to do so.
It was so astonishingly one-sided that it's difficult to know where to begin. But the theme was that governments are not doing enough to save us from being poisoned by carbon, or from flooding, or from heat, so the fate of the world is now in the hands of wonderful environmental lawyers who are battling heroically to save us all. Seriously, folks.
Mr Heap treated all these greeedy, chancer nutcases with breathless reverence as one by one, they spelled out their strategy. His profiles included a legal warrior in New Orleans who wants money for his house that he claims was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, because that was unquestionably caused by climate change. This was followed by an outraged Inuit who wanted millions because the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising seal levels. Next stop was Europe, where a hero legal-eagle was invoking the chilling EU Aaarhus ruling to ensure that every green activist who believes they are affected by climate change can sue whomever is held responsible.
Mr Heap followed with a UK woman who has blown £150,000 of her own money heroically fighting a court battle to stop a cement works being built because it plans to use nasty fossil fuels for power. The programme then took on an almost surreal air as environmental camapigners entered the frame. There was an interview with a woman from an organisation calledGaia, who wanted legal rights for trees, and an end to the Western tradition of law because it did not recognise that Mother Earth needed its own charter so that in future, nothing could be done that could be seen to cause harm to ecology. And finally, there was a British lawyer who is campaigning relentlessly to bring in a new international law called "eco-cide", to stand alongside genocide in seriousness. Under it, anyone who transgresses against the environment will be put on trial in the Hague, or wherever, just like the Nazis. She stopped short of calling for the death penalty for offenders - but that was clearly on her mind.
In this 30 minutes of eco-buffonery, Mr Heap never once questioned any element of the claims about man-made climate change. It was an unmoderated, unsubtle, one-sided, preposterous pitch in favour of lawyers becoming all-powerful in suing, jailing, and generally nailing everyone and anyone who commits an eco-crime. By giving them such a platform, he clearly supported the idea that those affected by climate change should be awarded billions of pounds in compensation, and for lawyers to have instant powers to jack boot us all into nature worship. Under this regime, any burning of fossil fuel, any cutting down of trees, any human action that was deemed to interfere with nature would be punishable.
The so-called climate experts (all warmists, naturally) he called on to confirm that damage is being perpetrated, and to show how it might be calibrated, did concede that everything they did is based on modelling, and that precise measurements of the actual impact of climate change were therefore difficult. But Mr Heap cheerfully glossed over this little difficulty and told us that it would no doubt be overcome in the near future.
This was a full-scale pitch of the BBC eco-creed. They may not be sending an army to Cancun, like they did to Copenhagen, but inside the corridors of Portland Place, Television Centre, White City and Salford Quays, they are clearly planning how climate sceptics will be put on trial, and all industrial activity involving fossil fuel will be suspended and so much bound in red tape that it will become impossible. And one thing is for sure. There will be whole battallions of BBC staff at the eco-cide show trials.
PETER ALLEN: TEA PARTIES "BIT STRONG FOR OUR TASTES"
>> THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2010
The BBC's Kevin Connolly has been doing a series of reports from Missouri this week for Radio Five Live Drive. Yesterday he spoke to Reed Chambers, a Tea Party activist in the city of Independence. In response to a series of quick-fire questions Chambers said that he wanted lower taxes, federal government to keep out of healthcare, less gun control, that he backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (adding "any war should be prosecuted to the fullest effect of our military until the opponent is crushed"), and was personally against abortion. He said Obama was a horrific president (which Connolly misheard as "terrific", much to his own amusement) with a leftist agenda. Peter Allen in London couldn't believe what he was hearing, so alien to his mindset were these opinions:
THE AXEING OF THE QUANGOS
Listen to this interview by Sarah Montague and in particular focus on her tone when she engages with Conservative Francis Maude. The glacial edge is so obvious, hostility barely disguised when she gets going. I can't understand why the Conservatives indulge the BBC, treating it as some sort of benign national treasurer when in fact it is an international malignancy.
SAY FAIRNESS, THINK WELFARE.
It's the big issue of the day. Well, it is the BBC big issue of the day. Are immigrants "drawn" to Britain because it is a fair society? Do they think they will be treated fairly, investigates John Humphrys. Mmm - I suppose if one translates "fairness" as meaning instant access to welfare largesse and an acceptance that assimilation is not required, then there's not a fairer country in the world?
WHAT ABOUT THE VICTIMS?
One of the new causes that the BBC is fervently supporting is the mantra that prisons don't work. During the Labour years, the corporation was virtually silent on this issue, mainly because Blair, Straw, Brown and their lackeys clearly diasagreed.
But now that the Cleggerons seem hell bent on reducing the prison population sharply, our nice BBC reporter friends are on a full-scale hunt for every snippet that will support their case. Today it's a platform for those perennial do-gooders the Howard league for penal reform to trumpet that only 6% of prison governors believe that short prison sentences work in helping to rehabilitate prisoners. Well hang on. Short prison sentences are not, and have never been intended to rehabilitate as a primary purpose. They're there to send the message that in a civilised society, certain anti-social, irresponsible behaviour leads to a loss of liberty and all the inconveniences that go with it. It's also a way of protecting the public and of spreading the reassuring message that if you do bad things, bad things happen to you.
The survey question was as inane as asking whether hanging would help in rehabiliating someone. I note that in the article that there is not a peep from anyone who supports jail as a deterrent or from those (like me) who are deeply uneasy about further ill-considered liberal experimentation in this complex area. Of course, we would all like more effective ways of rehabilitating people, but there is no sign that anything like this is being offered; the alternative to jail seems to be to not jail them - because it saves money - and/or give offenders community sentences (which are so circumscribed by human rights restrictions as to be a useless joke). Note also the careful selection of a quote from a supposed university expert saying that we should "address the needs of offenders". Right on. Exactly the BBC mentality. But what about the victims of crime? And public safety?
ON BBC EDITORIAL GUIDELINES
>> WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2010
Excellent post by Mailman here and I wanted to share the detail more broadly - see below!
"Sorry but the BBC's issues with impartiality are one of culture, which cannot simply be addressed by adding a few words to a document your staff will never really read.
If the BBC was serious about impartiality you wouldnt need a document like this telling us how awesome you are simply because the BBC would already be impartial.
I mean lets face the truth here. The BBC stopped reporting the news decades ago and instead started reporting its opinion as the news. You want to be serious about reporting the news, get rid of all the BBC blogs which are nothing more than a collection of leftist ideology.
Please do tell us underserving underlings how exactly the BBC will change how it reports Mann Made Global Warming (tm), Immigration, Islam, Republicans, British way of life, multiculturalism over night? Actually, lets be slightly more realistic, how does the BBC plan to report on any of these items over the next 10 years?
Sadly, each of the above items I have listed the BBC has shown a marked bias towards. Mann Made Global Warming, the BBC is an advocate. Immigration, the BBC is an advocate for unlimited immigration. Islam, the BBC is an advocate for Islam and censors any and all stories that shines light in the true nature of the beast (anyone seen an in depth analisys of Wilders trial or Theo Van Goughs murder? No, didnt think so). Republicans, how many times did the BBC regurgitate the lie of Palins beautiful son being her grand son? Dont even get me started on how the BBC has treated and still does treat GW. British way of life...the BBC is an advocate for the destruction of the British way of life, after all its unfair to expect all those immigrants to adapt to Britain and fit in.
So yes, please do explain how you intend to change the BBC when so many of the biases I have listed above are so deeply ingrained in to the corporations leftist culture."
ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE...
Nice to see the BBC providing a platform for those seeking to put a shineon what is going to be a VERY bad set of mid-term election results for Obama. As a Biased BBC contributor puts it - wishful thinking.
DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH...
Neil Midgley reports optimistically in the Daily Telegraph today that theBBC's new editorial guidelines will force our greenie friends at the corporation to start including more so-called sceptics in their climate alarmist reporting, because for the first time, science is included in rules about impartiality.
My advice is not to hold your breath. I have a letter from Ceri Thomas, editor of Today, saying that because there is a 'consensus' about global warming, reporting of the subject only needs to give "due impartiality" to sceptics. In other words, sceptics are wrong, the consensus is right, and programmes should only pay minimal lip-service to them.
Nothing that I can see in the new guidlines changes this. Mr Thomas is pretty much representative of the entire BBC management class, and he sits on the board of a warmist organisation that camapaigns to give the warmist cause more prominence, and excludes sceptics.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of pounds of our money are being wasted indistributing 12,500 of these useless new guideline documents to BBC staff in Britain "and round the world". What wonderful self-love!
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