A so-called “investigative” scoop in the Daily Telegraph suggesting that the BBC is involved in the organisation of COMplus, an international group that supports climate change alarmism, has also caused ripples in the blogsphere. Richard North and WUWT have followed up. I’m totally in favour of enterprising, sceptical journalism, but I’m afraid on this occasion, the Telegraph is more than a year behind. I filed this story (based on research I carried out after an item by Richard North) on COMplus – whose acolytes include toerags such as former Labour ministers Eliot Morley and Stephen Byers – on March 15, 2010 (with a follow-up amplifying some of the key points on the same day) and gave chapter on verse why it was an insiduous menace in which the BBC was playing a major role. EU Referendum also had this, detailing the full scale of COMplus linkages. What was unearthed back then went far beyond the Telegraph’s latest revelations, and I spelled out one aspect of the way the influence operated:
The scale and modus operandi of this activity beggars belief, and the BBC is in every sense a key component, putting it firmly in bed with the main greenie activists around the world. Look for example, at just one of the COMplus partner organisations, the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE). Naturally, its main goal is to make greenie propaganda (the annual report is a manual about the chilling art). The main outlet is on the BBC World television service; its programmes such as Earth Report reach 172 countries and notch up audiences of 100m plus. Principal funders of TVE include the World Wildlife Fund, Christian Aid, and Oxfam – the usual suspect NGOs who, in their pursuit of climate change nonsense, have become polticial activists whose main aim is to spread the lie that the West is to blame for all the developing world ills. Predictably, TVE is run by one Cheryl Campbell, a former BBC journalist (and greenie fanatic) who was also communications chief of Christian Aid.
Also in on the act is the Reuters Foundation, which, as B-BBC also established in a previous post is the founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This body is run partly by BBC journalist James Painter, a climate change activist who is a model of his type; Goebbels would have been proud of him.
I don ‘t want to be churlish, and I am pleased that the Telegraph is finally looking at the rat’s nest of establishment money-down-the-drain activity that supports climate change hysteria. But if investigative ace Jason Lewis properly read blogs such as EU Referendum and B-BBC, he’d truly be ahead of the pack. The real scandal here is that the BBC is not only involved in COMplus, but also directly part of a huge related network of climate change activism.
Hi RH, had it previously been revealed in your B-BBC articles that the ‘impartial investigators’ who gave the ‘Climategate’ activists – oops! – academics, a clean bill of health were in fact AGW activists themselves?
Whether you’ve covered it before or its just been covered now it is earth shattering stuff that calls for an investigation of the entire global warming ‘scientific’ community.
Keep digging Robin. Sooner or later the penny should drop with our lazy journalists that its just as easy to cut and paste from the blogsphere as from the stream of press releases flowing out of the Eco-Alarmist industry. Better stories, and true.
When approached in the street by tabard-wearing footsoldiers for these loathsome “formerly-a-Charity (but kept the name)” organisations, instead of avoiding them as you do, I stop and tell them what I think of their stinking organisations and why.
In future I want it to be them who cross the road to avoid members of the public, instead of the other way around.
So, we as taxpayers, are unwittingly forced to fund BBC-Greenies to donate to their favourite political causes!
BBC-Greenies censor that ‘Telegraph’ report, of course.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8469883/Lobbyists-who-cleared-Climategate-academics-funded-by-taxpayers-and-the-BBC.html
I think people still underestimate the influence of the ecofascist axis, these people know what they are doing, they have solid gold contacts and they have unlimited funding. The BBC has always been up to its eyeballs in this CAGW fraud with hacks like Black & Co taking full fiscal advantage and lining their pockets.
Any MSM journalist trying to take these people on face a massive challenge sinply because of the pressure the axis can exert higher up the hackosphere food chain. Its like posting a letter when your enemies are in the sorting office. Gangs like the BBC and globe and complus have a common purpose and a set of common aims, they are very much like a cancer on the national body.
If and when the MSM gets off its arse to investigate this giant fraud it will make climategate look like a lesson in honesty. This will be the biggest and messiest and shocking fraud ever uncovered with many very influential people fouind to be on the make and on the take.
The sheer scale and depth of the fraud and how much influence the fraudsters wield with a few people able to control much of what the MSM reports. gangs like the BBC and the NUJ and the SEC and others with reuters and AP editing out as many damaging stories as they can.
The excellent samizdata blog picks up on this point:
“There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who’s-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough…
…but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago.”
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/
Such as this also highlights the paucity of visitations (in number and quality) by this site’s few lurking Tourettes-afflicted vultures, who on occasion may have a fair counter and point to an individual post, but almost inevitably cannot resist a daft attempted dismissal of the overall site, authors and vast majority at the same time. On a free, open blog.
I would dearly love to have a view on the same basis from these defenders on the faith on such as this, from a supposedly professional, impartial £4B media broadcaster, where the entire country is compelled to co-fund such as the above.
Meanwhile, Mr. Black has responded as anticipated…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2011/04/giant_tortoise_salvation.html?postId=108323125#comment_108323125
Subtle.
As I posted in the Easter Open thread – Lets be clear, my taxes and TV license monies are paying for a group of people to perpetuate a lie, so as to enable government to tax me even more – genius!