Monthly Archives: December 2009

The BBC’s job is to report impartially what goes on in the world. To pursue that task, it receives at least £750m of your money every year, and it has almost 5,000 staff who are directly involved in journalism. So when steel-making on Teeside, one of our oldest manufacturing industries, faces closure, with the loss of 300 years of tradition and 10,000 jobs, you would expect the corporation to be in the forefront of explaining why.

You would be wrong. Richard North, writing on his excellent EU Referendum blog, brings us today in glowing technicolour the real reasons why Tata steel have mothballed the Redcar steelworks (losing immediately 1,700 jobs, but in the longer term almost 9,000 more who support or whom are dependent on the plant). In an nutshell, it is being “mothballed” (but more likely permanently closed)not because of “falling demand“, but as a direct casualty of the pernicious gravy train that is the EU emissions trading scheme. This makes it more lucrative for the host company to suspend production at the plant and use it instead to accumulate ‘carbon credits’ on its balance sheet. The cumulative worth of this sleight-of-hand juggling is, according to Richard, a staggering £1bn+. Against such forces, the poor saps in Middlesbrough did not stand a chance.

I searched the BBC website for more than half an hour looking for any mention of this. There are dozens of stories and backgrounders about the closure, and lots of hot air from Mandelson and his henchmen, but not a whisper of this crucial angle. It seems also that BBC reporters were present at the press conference where Kirby Adams, the Redcar divisional boss, told the Times that the EU rules were behind the closure. They ignored what he said. So when it comes to climate change issues, the BBC are not only not reporting the truth, they are in cahoots with government ministers in deliberately hiding it. Their passion for global warming zealotry is so great that they simply cannot bring us facts that do not support it. And one man and his blog are more effective in bringing us the truth than all the wind and puff of the BBC’s £750m news machine.

Even the BBC’s coverage of bias is biased when it comes to the climate change debate. This, posted today, is the BBC’s attempt to create “balance” in the debate about AGW. I haven’t the time now to go into detail about why this is a blatant, pathetic whitewash. I am sure others will in due course. But how about for starters, the words devoted to the AGW case are far more than those on the “sceptic” side? Why are the “sceptic” points so crudely put? And why are the vast majority of linked sites pro-AGW? Dozens of climate realist sites are missed out, including Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky – those that have done most to expose the gross BBC bias.

Further to Robin’s post yesterday about this week’s Newswatch, here are the transcripts of the exchanges between presenter Raymond Snoddy and environment correspondent Richard Black.

First exchange:

Snoddy: Richard Black, as a journalist do you think the BBC really underplayed this story despite Today and Newsnight items?

Black: In quantitative terms I’m not sure that we have underplayed it. I don’t think that stands up. But there is another side to – certainly comments I’ve had in from the public – is that, which talk about the way we’ve treated it and whether we’ve asked the kinds of questions that Chris and Anthony [the guest viewers in the studio] are suggesting that need to be asked.

Snoddy: In science terms the Newsnight science correspondent said this was as bad as it gets in science. I mean, has the BBC really reflected the enormity of this controversy?

Black: Well there are different views about how enormous it really is. There are many in the scientific community who say that it actually doesn’t alter the scientific picture one jot. To start with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is just one of a number of institutions in the world that keep records of global temperatures so even if all the CRU interpretations and analysis turned out to be wrong it doesn’t invalidate all the other analyses. And they also point out the fact that the raw data is not something that’s gathered by CRU – it’s used by CRU and analysed by CRU, but the raw data is still out there.

Black admits that there was a failure to ask the questions that viewers wanted answered, but then in his response to Snoddy’s point about “the enormity of this controversy” he reveals the very mindset that made the asking of those challenging questions so unlikely. Clearly Black doesn’t think that this is a big deal at all.

Second exchange:

Snoddy: Richard Black, Steve Mitchell actually said that it’s the BBC’s aim to reflect the whole range of views on this issue. Here’s two viewers who don’t think the BBC does. What have you got to say to them?

Black: The guidelines, the sort of broadest guidelines in terms of our climate change coverage are set by the BBC Trust. They issued a document a couple of years ago on impartiality that dealt with many issues. On climate change they made it clear that in their view the sort of old balance that we used to have between two equally weighted sides of a debate were simply out of date. That doesn’t apply any more, and the sort of weight of the scientific evidence lies with the IPCC view. But they do also explicitly say that sceptical, contrarian views – whatever you want to call them – should not be absent from the coverage, that we cannot neglect them. I think it is a bit of an urban myth that we do neglect them.

As Robin pointed out, Black is referring to the guidelines laid down in the BBC Trust document From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel – Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century (2007). From page 40:

“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.”

TonyN at Harmless Sky put in an FoI request to find out more about this seminar. He was told that it took place in January 2006, but the BBC refused to name the “scientific experts”, fobbing him off with the same “editorial policy” excuse used to hide the Balen Report:

In this case, the information you have requested is outside the scope of the Act because information relating to the seminar is held to help inform the arc’s editorial policy around reporting climate change.

I notice that at least one more FoI request concerning the January 2006 seminar has been made recently and is currently under consideration by the BBC. If the BBC once again fails to release the names of the scientific experts upon whose advice climate change editorial policy was determined then we will draw our own conclusions.

[Incidentally, Newswatch is worth seeing for no other reason than the amusing “nods” of Snoddy (Snods?) inserted into his interview with the BBC’s Steve Mitchell. What’s with all the licking of lips? Had Snoddy just eaten a sugared doughnut? Was it some sort of piss-take? Odd.]

I listened carefully in BBC bulletins last night and this morning to David Shukman spreading AGW panic about melting glaciers in Bolivia, which he left no doubt were because of “climate change”. Poor, hapless Bolivians were dying of thirst because of Western greed, etc.

I decided to do a bit of google-digging to find if this, indeed, was the “consensus”. It turned out to be like wading through treacle because the topic is dominated by NGOs and other propagandists, who are as fanatical as Shukman. But without too much difficulty, I came across this(you need to scroll down a bit to get to the relevant entry):

It is ironic that the melting Chacaltaya glacier has become such an important symbol of the AGW theory, when in fact the evidence from Chacaltaya seems to refute this theory. (In contrast, the evidence from Chacaltaya is fully consistent with Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory (5), but that is another story).

At the very least, what this shows is that the science behind Shukman’s melting glaciers is highly complex and the subject of debate. To suggest that there is “consensus” or agreement is nonsense.

Yet again, the BBC’s so-called “experts” on this topic are found to be pushing in the crudest way questionable theories in the hyping up of the need for more taxes in Copenhagen. No doubt Mr Shukman had a nice trip to Bolivia (at our expense) and enjoyed speaking with activists who agreed with him. The Bolivians themselves obviously want to press the “we’re doomed” button because they want cash from Gordon Brown. But pushing their views in this unfiltered, unbalanced way is not journalism. It’s propaganda.