Paxo gets a stuffing
Paxman: a BBC man through and through
So how exactly would the BBC cover Peter Lilley's devastating critique of the Stern Review? This week we had our answer on Newsnight: by trying to bury it beneath a piece of reportage so shrill and tendentious it might have come straight off a Greenpeace press release…. (H/T Bishop Hill)
As indeed it pretty much did. The report concerned a Cambridge professor named Peter Wadhams who would like us to believe that he has found devastating new evidence that the arctic is melting faster than ever before.
And guess who's providing the mother ship for his adventures?
Now can you imagine the fuss if a polar research team was sent to the arctic on a ship paid for by Koch Industries. Or Exxon. Or even Biteback, evil, mainly right-wing publisher of James Delingpole's Watermelons.
The greenies would have a fit wouldn't they? There'd be a whole wailing wall's worth of lamentation from Monbiot, and Leo Hickman, and Damian Carrington and all the usual suspects. Any scientific research that emerged therefrom would be declared wholly invalid because of its outrageously biased source.
So why don't similar rules apply to Greenpeace, a hard-left, virulently anti-capitalist organisation denied charitable status by the New Zealand High Court last year on the grounds that its activities were political rather than educational and that its members had acted illegally?
It can't be said often enough: there is nothing cute or cuddly about Greenpeace. Their trade is propaganda and scaremongering, not facts.
But I digress. Really, my purpose here was to have a go at the BBC and most especially Paxman, who, I thought, didn't emerge at all well from his encounter with the deceptively mild Lilley.
Much as I enjoy Paxman's Flashmanesque swagger, I've long thought there's something slightly suspect about the world's second most famous Old Malvernian. He's another Ian Hislop, which is to say that he's quite good at giving the impression of being quite pukka and old school and a stickler for all the things that made Britain great – but really, when it comes down it, he's just another mildly pinko BBC apparatchik.
I was particularly struck by the disingenuousness of his response to Lilley's accusations of BBC bias in its coverage of climate change. Paxman put on his best, withering contempt voice:
"The BBC is not sufficiently co-ordinated to concoct something like that."
But it is. The BBC's bias on climate change has been widely reported here, here, here and here. It's not an accident: it'sOFFICIAL BBC POLICY as sanctioned by the BBC trust.
Surely, if Paxo is as thorough and no-nonsense a journalist as he makes out then he ought to be aware of this. If he isn't then maybe it's about time the lazy bugger did some homework. And if he is, then what on earth is a journalist of such vaunted integrity doing making statements he knows to be untrue?
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