More propaganda from the BBC
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Chris Booker talks about a propaganda programme made recently by the BBC. This is a summary of his Sunday Telegraph article about it, from early March 2015.

Next January will see the 10th anniversary of one of the most curious episodes in the history of the BBC. At a secret seminar, many of its senior executives met with invited outsiders to agree on a new policy in breach of its Charter. They agreed that the BBC’s coverage of climate change should be one-sided, contravening its statutory obligation that its coverage of controversial subjects should be accurate and impartial. Anything contradicting the party line could be ignored.

The BBC Trust reported that the seminar had taken this decision on the advice of the best scientific experts present. Years later, after the BBC had spent tens of thousands of pounds trying to suppress the identities of its scientific experts, it emerged that they had been referring to climate activists from Greenpeace, Stop Climate Chaos and similar groups.

This led to hundreds of programmes being blatantly biased.

Last week the BBC was at it again, in its programme Climate Change By Numbers. The programme pretended to take a fresh look at the issue, using three mathematicians to analyse the science.

We began with a young lady mathematician explaining how we know that the world has warmed since 1880.

She skated round the controversial methods by which temperature data have been adjusted. The world has warmed by about 0.85 degrees, which is not disputed. What she left out was that this is not unusual. Two earlier warming phases from natural causes, between 1860 and 1880 and from 1910 to 1940, were just as large as the one ending in about 1995.

The second segment showed a professor using his passion for Spurs football team to tell us that computer models are reliable. What he omitted to explain was that, in the past 17 years, the IPCC’s computer model predictions about global temperatures have all been wrong.

In the final segment, another professor used a sequence about motor-racing to tell us that pouring increasing amounts of man-made CO2 into the atmosphere has led us to more frequent and more extreme weather events. This was also factually incorrect, as admitted by the IPCC recently. Extreme weather events are neither more extreme nor more frequent than they were previously.

The BBC knows it has a legal obligation to be impartial. The people running it know that they are breaking the law. But they also know they can get away with it, because no one in authority will call them to account.

UPDATE

With embarrassing timing, Parliament's European Scrutiny Committee has released a report saying that the BBC's coverage of European issues is shallow and biased.

Given the possibility that Britain will hold a referendum on its EU membership at some point in the next two years, the implication that the BBC is failing to provide balance is very troubling.

Given that the BBC is constitutionally obliged to represent everyone across the political spectrum, it needs to get its house in order.

26 Mar 15