BBC/Guardian United In Palin Email Frenzy

BBC/Guardian United In Palin Email Frenzy

>> FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2011

A short while ago I posted the following in the Open Thread:

I see the Guardian is going balls deep over the Palin emails. They've even got a dedicated Twitter account about it, FFS. And if something is big news to the Guardian you can guarantee it will be big news to the BBC.

Right on cue, here's an exchange of tweets between Newsnight's Emily Maitlis and the Guardian's Ian Katz: Don't you just love that "(of course). (yiippee)"? They hate her. They really hate her. UPDATE. They're searching urgently for something really bad: And just for good measure, also on Newsnight tonight: Finding BBC bias - like shooting fish in a barrel.

LAUGHING STOCK...

My beef with Richard Black, repeated in more posts than I care to remember, is simple. He has become an advocate, not a reporter. I am not a scientist, but was once a BBC producer and reporter - who became a very senior executive of a news organisation - and so I do have the competence to judge him in this respect. Today, in this piece claiming that global warming is now proven, he has yet again crassly demonstrated that he is not doing his job. True to style, he has picked one remark by a constroversial climate scientist called Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and elevated it to the level of a major news story. The point that Mr Black has chosen to exaggerate and thus endorse in this way is that the said Professor Jones has now found evidence that the warming of the past fifteen years is a "real" phenomenon because global temperatures over the past year have again been high. Why is this approach so wrong and so fundamentally at variance with his duties as reporter? First Mr Black knows that because of Climategate, Professor Jones is a highly controversial figure who in some quarters (to put it mildly) does not have credibility. He would be an idiot not to. Chosing him is thus deliberate confrontation, akin to asking Goebbels to give Hitler a character reference. Second, the statistical concept which Mr Black maintains confirms Professor Jones' observations, is not accepted in the way he suggests. Bruce Hoult, for example, on the Bishop Hill site, notes succinctly:

To put explicitly what others have alluded to: significance at the 95% confidence level (2 sigma) is generally accepted as the threshold for saying "gee, this looks interesting, more research is justified to see if we can tighten up those bounds a couple more sigma and see whether there's really anything here or not".It is most definitely NOT grounds for saying something is proven beyond reasonable doubt or to a level warranting policy action.

This is a point about elementary scientific methodology - as always Mr Black takes the side of the advocate he wants to believe. He further puts two fingesr up by stating:

Since then (Climategate investigations), nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC's basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.

Third, Mr Black never ever provides balancing comment or evidence. He wants instead to blare out that Professor Jones is right. Yet he ignores (in his piece today and always) evidence like this, the much-discussed and publicised G.G.Koutsoyiannis paper (fully peer-reviewed)which throws serious doubt on the theorising about rising global temperatures. The BBC has broadcast or published not a peep about this paper and yet carries on regardless pumping out endless climate change drivel. I repeat. For all these reasons - and more - Mr Black is a cheap propagandist, not a reporter. I'm spelling it out yet again because I believe that one day, someone at the corporation will realise that such agitprop has made the BBC's alleged journalism into a laughing stock.