As widely predicted, the BBC4 programme on climate change last night was a ham-fisted stitch-up. Richard North ably explains here. It’s in their genes; anyone they think is outside their neme is isolated, gulled, done over and then ultimately ridiculed with all the grace and style of a two-dime huckster. The tragedy is that they genuinely think that this counts as legitimate programme making. I concur with Richard that this technique is deployed to salve their battered egos and shore up their belief systems, it is telling that this exercise has been on the drawing board for considerable time.
Meanwhile, last night’s Horizon – about latest research on pain – was also a gem of political correctness in the same mould. I deal these days a lot with people doing research into infant psychology. To cut a long story short, the central model of child development is called Attachment Theory, in which there is very substantial research that secure attachment to parents (or main carers) in the first years of life is essential in facilitating normal mental and social development. But in all the discussion about this said Attachment Theory(it was central to the argument about pain tolerance), the programme carefully and systematically – to the point of idiocy – avoided any statement that directly highlighted that a nurturing and relatively stable family life is important to a developing infant. The elephant in the room was glaringly not mentioned or circumlocuted. The BBC, of course, hates anything that supports the traditional nuclear family. Their response is Pavolovian.
Update: Here, from the WUWT blog, is a videotape editor’s review of last night’s programme on Lord Monckton. It’s long, but the guy has 25 years experience, and it is worth including in full to show the full extent of BBC bias:
Meet the Skeptics’ was a great example of clumsy, heavy handed storytelling. Nothing more. The most telling techniques include the way Monckton was seldom given more than 10 seconds to say anything, with cutaways covering obvious edits in his talking in order to make it seem like he is saying something he probably isn’t. It’s easy. I do it everyday, though I tend to do it to enhance understanding not to misrepresent. On the other hand, Monckton’s detractors were given free reign to speak with 30, 40, 45 seconds of screen time to expound their ideas and make their point.
The part where Monckton was caught (supposedly) looking forlorn as he read the (apparently) devastating report about his address to Congress was pure pathos, made all the more emotional by the sad piano music and then the cut to him sitting alone, in the distance, looking out onto the loch, no doubt contemplating the obvious and terrible mistakes he’d made. Except we didn’t learn what those mistakes were other than a rather lame mis-attribution which he owned up to.
Murray had a chance here to actually present the sceptics’ case, however much he disagreed with it. Instead he chose to malign and mis-represent through juxtaposition (witness the homophobe and gun-wielding bigots), through use of music (the mournful piano and the buffoonery of Gilbert & Sullivan telling us what to feel), through language (such as the repeated use if the phrase ‘what he thought was true’ and it’s variations and naturally, through selective editing,
Given the exact same material I could edit a programme that would tell a totally different story. Never be told that a documentary is truth.
Your comments suggest a homosexual parental group would be just as good. Sir Elton anyone? Surely the BBC would be rushing to support that?
I decided not to watch “Horizon” last night on the grounds that even the BBC couldn’t find a politically correct angle on the subject of pain.
Despite my many years of hard-bitten cynicism when it comes to the BBC, it seems I can still be guilty of lapses into naivety.
It’s the complex media relations and the numbers they represent that I find interesting in all this.
As many have noted, the ‘documentary’ itself ended up screened on a Channel i was barely aware of, at a time when I have better things to do.
So how many actually saw it will be worth checking.
I also understand it is not (yet) on iPlayer for some reason.
Hence one moves to the blogosphere, with the competing tribal groupings around the (A)GW ‘debate’ there.
Again, numbers are a factor.
Monbiot can stir up a fair few faithful, but a Graun hack would ne lucky to get a few hundred. An outside Aunty’s quaint notion of a ‘split’, often many of these will be highly critical, before being ‘Comments are free (until modded)’.
Mr. Delingpole can mobilise a few more on occasion.
Now, as with Mr. Monckton, while I concede he can make a few valid points, he certainly does not ‘speak for me’ as the programme makers and the BBC would try to have us believe. I doubt these gents would say they do either. It was always a facile premise form the off.
So the focus is now moving away from the actual topic of warmist advocacy vs. (A)GW denial to media jiggery-pokery. And that seems to have stirred up a lot more folk who usually remain passive and dormant, but still lurk and absorb what swirls about in the agenda-driven cess pool of MSM reporting of near any topic these days.
The problem is the dubious relationships that can be used to spin a story back up. The BBC produces yet another howler, realises it, and sticks it out in a backwater. A degree of online activity (a few thousand blog posts/tweets out of a total audience base of 60M) ensues, and then the BBC can cherry pick from the most minor and least representative ‘source’ of all, the Graun, to port across to ‘main’ news, stated as press-endorsed ‘fact’. Craig has this practice nailed near daily now.
Personally, this is just the latest episode in a very shoddy, downward-spiralling series that shows the BBC cannot be trusted to be objective or factually accurate on anything it decides to meddle in these days.
Hardly a credible basis to continue demanding an enforced tax from those who do not believe or want its output if so tainted by propagandist tarnished gilding.
In summary, and in due deference to the thread title, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, if the BBC wants it to be a turkey, the production staff have the will and means, along with senior market rate management endorsement, to present it as such, duly stuffed, for the delectation of those who who are still not motivated just to check that they haven’t left more rotting entrails inside.
I would not go near near all of their output now without first engaging a very long bargepole and a very cranked eyebrow.
And I don’t think I should have to pay for a service I feel that way about.
>>The tragedy is that they genuinely think that this counts as legitimate programme making.<<
I have great difficulty in accepting this. When people wilfully engage in deceit and manipulation to subvert a duty to impartiality its an extremely long shot to believe they care about legitimacy.
Its a bit like saying that the Nazis genuinely believed murdering 6 million jews was a moral act.
The bits I saw of the climate programme were beyond fisking – your fisk would be longer than the programme. The Jaws background music when Lindzen was on the screen then cut to a slowmo of the Hadley Centre/IPCC sunshine bouncing of his golden ringlets and choirs of angels singing in the background.
The question is not How Stupid Do You Have To Be To Fall For This Guff?
Rather it is; How Stupid Do You Have To Be To Believe You Can Make People Fall For This Guff.
A fourth rate programme on a fifth rate television channel.
Edit: sb Hadley Centre/IPCC shill
Hi All
I am just a middle of the road human, trying to survive daily life and on this subject, trying to understand the evidence. How I see it is this.
Is the earth heating up. Possibly but no conclusive evidence
Has this happened before. Yes
Is this heating up caused by human intervention. Possibly but no conclusive evidence
Is the earth going thru a natural phase cycle of heating and cooling. Possibly but no conclusive evidence.
Are there a lot of people on this earth: Yes Fact
Are we all going to die at some stage: Yes Fact
This documentary is a poor piece of film making if it is to be considered an unbiased view.
Too many biased images leaning to one side (Dramatic footage of floods and desert, Satirical music along side images of a “skeptic”, a publish email to a Climate scientist, not one the other way round)
The film does not contain anything about skeptics in plural, just a man on a mission.
What p*%sess most of us middle of the road people is that we are exposed to this from the pro climate activists especially from the BBC.
No one every produces a serious even handed documentary covering both sides…actually I am gonna grab my camcorder and do it my self….and call myself a film maker.
tell you what Rupert…dare you to make contact and film me doing a proper documentary.
It’s all been said so many times before, it’s really not worth saying again. BBC? Shit. End of.
Natsman,
Yes, the BBC is beyond parody, totally out of control and they don’t give a damn.
Credit to al-beeb though.
The programme was (inadvertently) a masterclass in how to make a truly dreadful documentary.
It should be placed on the curriculum of every Meeja Studies course in the country. I shall email Michael Gove forthwith.
I felt a bit off having an opinion on a program I hadn’t the stomach to watch !then I remembered the BBC is full of horse “£$% about programs they write off as ‘polemics’ and program makers they write up as ‘ biased’ all with without the right of reply to those who have actually seen it or been part of it !
This was the worst kind of childish look at me docufarce that the BBC love to commission, it was a pure character assassination by a failed ecowhack who judging from the picture I saw in the Telegraph cannot even get his tiny green mind round the best use of a razor !
Funny and hypocritical as the docu?? sorry polemics by Gilligan Curtis and Durkin are reviled by the beebles ?