The BBC and Jimmy Savile: peas in a pod
Savile: heavily into wind farms, apparently
Sorry for the radio silence. I've been out winning wars. And now that we've reached at least the end of the beginning of the battle to rescue Britain from the hideous wind farm menace it's time to start naming the guilty parties.
Guiltiest of all, in my book, is the BBC. Without the BBC's relentless propagandising on behalf of the alarmist cause everywhere from the Today programme to Springwatch to the hysterically doom-mongering reportage of Roger Harrabin and David Shukman the public appetite for climate action at all costs would not have been nearly so strong or undiscriminating. Nor would our politicians have been quite so desperate to prove their green credentials with lunatic policies like the Climate Change Act. This in turn would surely have meant fewer wind farms. And, better still, fewer expensive sports cars for the noisome Dale Vince. Perhaps Vince might even have been forced to get a proper job.
How did the BBC feel justified in playing Al Gore's Dr Goebbels when – under the terms of its charter – it is supposed to remain scrupulously balanced and neutral? Well, this is subject of a court case which has been going on this week, which has seen the massed ranks of the most expensive lawyers the BBC can muster pitted against a North Wales pensioner and his wife. It concerns the origins of this now-infamous occasion in 2006:
The BBC has 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].
Only one witness has stepped forward to reveal what happened that day, blogger and journalist (not to be confused with the one without the D.) Richard D North. He wrote:
I found the seminar frankly shocking, The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the Corporation) were matched by a equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the ‘we must support Kyoto’ school of climate change activists…
I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed.,I mean that I heard nothing which made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily). Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject … I spent the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.
I argued at the seminar that I thought most broadcasting coverage on climate change was awful. But I also said there was no need for them to become self-conscious about it, This was because, although the issues were scientifically, politically and economically difficult, the BBC’s reporting of the thing would improve as soon as their audience was asked to vote or pay for climate change policy.
All this piqued the interest of blogger Tony Newbery – aka Harmless Sky - who has been on the BBC's case ever since. Here he describes his motivation:
Years of watching the BBC’s coverage of this subject - with growing astonishment - during which numerous ‘scientific experts’ who clearly hold very partisan views on climate change, have been interviewed to provide viewers with what they were lead to believe were objective opinions on the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, has made me despair of BBC impartiality. I am thinking of people like George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Professor Chris Rapley, Lord May of Oxford, Sir David King and Professor Tom Burke in particular. Anyone who has followed this controversy will be well aware that, although such people may be experts on the subject, they are anything but impartial or objective.In an attempt to discover whether the BBC had organised this seminar in order to acquaint itself with the issues, or whether the purpose had been to obtain some kind of spurious authority for an editorial policy that had long since become ingrained in their news coverage, I thought that it would be worth trying to find out who had been invited to advise them. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations I made the following request to the BBC for information….
The BBC's response has been to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds – hey: aren't you glad your licence fee is so well spent? – trying to ensure he never finds out the answer.
This is a scandal. A bigger scandal, I'd argue, than the Jimmy Savile affair because so many more people are affected. For years, aided and abetted by its house menagerie of useful idiots from Chris Packham to David Attenborough, the BBC has been pumping out a relentless slew of climate change propaganda so frenziedly biased and hysterical it might just have well have come, unedited, from a Friends of the Earth press release.
The damage this has done to our country is incalculable: it has warped the minds of the young and impressionable, giving them utterly misleading notions about the state of climate science and the health of the planet; it has nudged our politicians into making truly fatuous decisions which have a deleterious influence on all our lives; it has lent a veneer of wholly unmerited moral credibility to the schemings of "green" politicians like Lord Deben, Tim Yeo and Chris Huhne; it has laid the foundations for a mad, mad world in which it is somehow deemed a rational and noble thing to pay rich, often absentee landowners out of the pockets of the poor to erect massive, bird-slicing bat-chomping eco crucifixes on their estates, spoiling the view for miles around, generating no useful electricity whatsoever, and actually – in so far as we need to care about such matters – increasing carbon emissions rather than reducing them.
I know I was on the BBC the other day – and it was jolly good fun reminding the ridiculous Caroline Lucas that she's a self-confessed "Watermelon". But, by God it's the most appalling institution.
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