Monthly Archives: June 2011

When, why and how did the rot set in at the BBC? As an ex-employee who joined the corporation in 1978 when there were at least some news and programme editors who did not support left-wing lunacy, I have often pondered this point. But a penny dropped this morning when I read an excellent piece about the inestimable corrosive damage caused to Africa by Live Aid…which also has led inexorably to the current prime minister’s hell-bent destruction of enterprise in developing countries by his insane insistence on boosting so-called aid budgets.

It was, of course, the BBC’s Michael Buerk who broke the Ethopia famine story that led to Live Aid the following year. I was indirectly involved, and in the immediate aftermath, I was proud of the broadcast and the impact in terms of famine relief. But then I watched with horror of a series of behind-the-scenes battles erupted. As the television award season approached, I became aware of a major row between Reuters Television(then Visnews) and the BBC. Reuters claimed it was their stringer camerman, the legendary Mo Amin, who broke the story; the BBC, for its part, wanted to take all the honours. It was an unseemly fight to the death which the BBC, with its superior resources and knee-in-groin approach, won – and the corporation walked off with the major gongs at that year’s Royal Television Society Awards.

I now see that it was probably at that time and in that context that the corporation hitched its wagon irrevocably to supporting “aid” to Africa at whatever price and without regard of the facts. The corporation – and phalanxes of left-liberal recruits who had been drafted into the BBC over the years – became so determined to show it was doing good in the world, in particular in Africa, that it abandoned any pretence of “balance” on such issues.

A touch simplistic maybe (you tell me). But it is a fact that since then, the BBC has blindly supported the tenets of aid to Africa and all that goes with it. Bob Geldof and the insufferable Bono are their shining knights. The World Service Trust, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is a campaign vehicle for both its aid paradigm and climate change activism. Comic Relief is another conduit involving BBC staff, resources, and endless one-sided journalism. And out of the steadfast support for such approaches flows the uncritical propaganda about climate change and world poverty that I wrote about yesterday.

I thus believe that what happened back in 1984-5 was a watershed. Michael Buerk – however unwittingly – set in train a paradigm of activism that has now become a biased crescendo and underpins the ideology of Cameron and his useless Tories.

Matt Ridley observes in his excellent book The Rational Optimist:

Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s, let alone the percentage living in such absolute poverty. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.

He goes on to explain that population growth has not led to the mass starvation that greenies have been predicting with monotonous regularity since the 1970s. There has been a revolution in food production that has tripled the yield of staple plants and ensured that – while there is still a long way to go – most on our wonderful planet have full bellies and increasing life expectancy.

But that doesn’t stop the BBC from trumpeting this alarmist report about starvation caused by climate change as if it were a certainty. They stick to their unquestioning acceptance of the green creed emblazoned on every BBC door: millions are going to die because of our nasty, selfish, capitalist ways. The subtext makes International Socialists look subtle. The report is from the same Doomsday script as has been rehearsed dozens of times before, based on the same flimsy models. And the reporter quotes without a trace of balance the preposterous opinion that we can limit – as if we had supernatural powers – global temperature rises as easily as switching a thermostat. Jennifer Carpenter is clearly yet another of the army BBC climate-change activists without the remotest comprehension of science or development history.