From today’s Independent:
The London-based television company being investigated by Ofcom over a global news fixing row tried to “cultivate” a world-famous environmental economist and other leading opinion formers in the green movement for the documentaries it made for the BBC and other news broadcasters.
FBC Media claims in its promotional literature that it targeted Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, to be an “ambassador” for its corporate client on programmes it made about the controversial palm oil industry in Malaysia.
Mr Sachs, a special adviser to United Nations secretary general Ban-Ki Moon, was a prominent interviewee on a BBC World “Third Eye” documentary about Malaysia which was produced by FBC. The Independent has established that FBC was paid £17m by the Malaysian government to work on a “global strategic communications campaign”. The documentary was one of eight FBC programmes made for the BBC found to have been in “serious” breach of corporation editorial guidelines in a report issued yesterday by the BBC Trust.
…more power to their elbow! Now we can hope for similar revelations re the BBC and Israel covergae, the BBC and Obama/US Democrats, BBC and Labour, BBC and The Guardian.
P.S. on the same news the other night when I saw the 10 minutes of Huw Edwards trying to put words in Vaz’s mouth re May (despite news already out elsewhere re Clark’s failures and omissions) they also showed the Herman Cain video of his Libya fail BUT they were joking about it…on air…on the evening news…WTF is wrong with them?
Has the BBC covered this on any of its channels? I’d be surprised if it had… it’s too busy fawning over Ed Balls and Ed Milliband today… no surprise there then.
I’m quite sure Michael Crick is on to this right now and will be reporting his findings breathlessly on Newsnight later. And if things get really serious Lord Patten might need to appoint another quango-parasite with identikit views on the environment to conduct a thorough independent investigation.
Prick no longer works for the BBC, I thin he pissed off to C4 News.
Indeed he did. The BBC was not left wing enough and he feels more at home a C(ommunist) 4 news
I was being shown an apple ipad2 today and viewed the guardian online. It was sponsored by channel 4. What’s that all about? I thought channel 4 was a public service broadcaster; incestuous or what?
Couldn’t happen to a nicer Corporation.
“There was no reason to doubt our interviewee”
That is amazing, as when I originally emailed Newsnight to complain about Palast’s hit piece about how evil Republicans engage in voter fraud and ACORN is a harmless bunch of scamps, a certain Newsnight producer and Palast co-conspiritor (he objects to that term, but I can’t see that it’s innacurate) Googled my name and did some sort of legal search to see if I had donated money to Republicans.
The BBC definitely checks people out when it suits them. No excuse here.
“FBC produced programmes for the BBC about Malaysia without declaring that it had been allocated £17m by the Malaysian government to carry out a global strategic communications campaign.”
(The earlier Independent report)
Coincidentally (surely?), there’s an article about Malaysia’s glorious record on ‘sustainability’, complete with mentions of its palm oil industry and Jeffrey Sachs, from a certain Richard Black back in May:
Reaching out for sustainability
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13444566
Tricky Dicky certainly gives the Malaysian government a glowing report, doesn’t he?
Curiouser and curiouser (to coin a phrase).
That Richard Black piece (19th May) was posted while the ‘Develop or Die’ series was running – between episodes 1 (15th May) and 2 (22nd May) of the BBC-trust-ESC-breaching Series 2.
Pure coincidence? Or Dicky watching the discredited programme -which plugged the Malaysian government’s record on sustainability – on BBC World & (not realising that it was dodgy, naturally) thinking, ‘I’ll just ring up the Malaysian PM’s office’, ask his spokesman how great Malaysia’s record on sustainability is and then blog about it?’
As they say at the BBC, #hmmm!
Corrupt as well as biased – to the core
“Crooked news is in our genes” ?
Eddie Mairs dreadful snowjob of a news board mentioned that the Wall Street slackjaws were involved in “scuffles” to stop the business people from getting about their business.
THat`ll be T.B and lethal injections then, given the BBCs wilful bias in favour of these protesters/molesters.
Hope this anarchic “stop feeding the machine” schtick will be used again when none of us pay our license fees…and demand back taxes they`ve snorted up their noses these last few years.
My year Zero is 2008 with Ross and Brand…but no doubt others will nominate their own year from which back payment will be collected from.
It is OUR BBC after all isn`t it?
September 13th, 2001
INBBC operates almost total political censorship on jihad, sharia, jizya in MALAYSIA.
See ‘Jihadwatch’ for counter-information on MALAYSIA.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/br0nc0s/managed-mt/mt-search.cgi?search=malaysia&IncludeBlogs=1&limit=20
Also:
“Fitzgerald: Sharia and dhimmitude in Malaysia”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/02/fitzgerald-sharia-and-dhimmitude-in-malaysia.html