As Durban fizzles out – much to Richard Black’s chagrin– and the wheels spectacularly fall off the renewables frenzy, Christopher Booker has summed up brilliantly the saga of how the corporation has abandoned its impartiality. There’s no hiding place from his searchlight; what has happened has been a deliberate, sustained climate alarmist campaign sanctioned from the highest levels and pursued with a vigour that would have impressed even Goebbels and Speer. The stench is now firmly at the door of the trustees, those “independent” citizens who are supposed to be the watchdogs of the BBC’s £3.5bn budget and its journalistic integrity.
This morning, to me, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky – whose impressive work Christopher Booker’s paper is based upon – has posed the most interesting question about their behaviour in this massive breach of the Royal Charter. For years the trustees claimed they had commissioned the Jones report into their science coverage only because it was part of a regular cycle of such reviews – it was not linked at all to mounting evidence of bias in their output and deliberate sidelining of sceptics. But Mr Newbery has spotted that Roger Harrabin, in his defence of his seedy links with the UEA Tyndall Centre, has let the cat out of the bag and given lie to their posturing. He said in a recent interview:
Climate sceptics seeking more space on the BBC helped provoke the Trust’s investigation into science impartiality but the Trust said we were already giving them too much space – not too little.
This means that without a shadow of a doubt, the trustees have known all along that they are engaged in a window dressing exercise and cynically commissioned the Jones nonsense both to cover their backs and to ram home even further that they did not give a stuff about sceptic opinion.
Could that be because at least three of them – Lord Patten, Diana Coyle and Anthony Fry – have direct pecuniary interests in the climate change scam? And I note that the latest trustee appointment (on December 1), Lord Williams of Baglan (who worked for the BBC World Service and then became a UN envoy) is also a climate change fanatic. The fact that he worked for the UN is enough to damn him, but he also lists among his financial interests membership of the international advisory board of CITPAX, a body that claims it supports peace, but in reality is engaged in climate change propaganda at the core of his activities.
To me, the BBC trustees are nothing more than a cosy club of climate change activists. Richard Black and his chums are scurrying around doing their bidding.
As for Durban, it was always going to be a big talking shop calling for more taxes and costs on Western Capitalism and the calls to steal wealth from the west and give it to dictators in poor countries.
All these things ever call for is taking money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries!
And… sorry to be off topic, but the breaking news that Cameron actually grew a pair and said no to the EU has left the BBC in a state of bereft shock.
The bitterness in Nick Robinson’s report was palpable as he lied his lying ass off claiming that a referendum would be a coalition deal breaker, when in reality a major change in our relationship with the EU would have triggered an in or out referendum according to their manifesto. Now we have the other 26 nations proceeding without us to a closer level of integration, we are now in the situation where they are going ahead without us and we are in a fundementally different relationship with the EU now, so we should have a referendum. A do we want to remain sidelined in a club which will hammer us? Or do we want out altogether?
I would vote for out!
Well its clear to me that at the very least the BBC’s governing body should be OFCOM.
It is such a pity that an organisation such as the BBC has allowed itself to be taken over the dirty little closet socialists who dream of nothing other than the complete subjugation of the West (which is probably why they are so in love with islam, they have the same objectives).
The sooner the corrupt, fetid carcuss of the BBC is buried the better for this country. Sadly though we have a government who are nothing more than labour in a different colour and will do nothing to touch the vile, corpulant fatness of the BBC.
Mailman
If you think that the BBC Trust has been rigged by filling it with political place-men, then OFCOM can’t possibly be a better option.
In theory, we’d need some form of idependent judicial oversight into the composition of and actions of the BBC Trust, but the words “independent” and “judicial” seem rarely to be found in the same paragraph these days.
I did say at the “very least”.
Personally Id make the tv tax optional and let the buggers swim in the same shark infested waters that all the others have to work in.
Mailman
You might change your mind, Mailman, if you read the sort of thing OFCOM publishes in its reports of investigations into complaints. Like the Beeboid Trust, it seems to inhabit a strange other world, far from where the rest of us dwell.
This is usually said to have started in Bill Goldman‘s script for the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, uttered by the supply known as “Deep Guitar neck.” It does not appear in the previously publication by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.
Expense forms
I agree that the Tony Newbery question strikes directly at the honesty, the probity of the BBC at top level.
Most were swept along by the Warmism tide, helped the BBC’s biased treatment. But then the voices of scepticism increased – with some very solid questions being asked about the “science” and also about the workings of the IPCC. People started charging the BBC with bias, refusal to pay proper attention to sceptical arguments. The BBC argued that “the science is settled” – this was the line that had been decided at the infamous management seminars-of-the-ignorant steered by Harrabin and the Warmists. Sceptical arguments were not presented by the BBC. The fix was in.
The BBC were able to weather the criticism – UNTIL ClimateGate 1 and also the Channel 4 documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. These created a big stink. The “science” did not look settled – it looked MANIPULATED.
So one of two things happened. The BBC at top level repeatedly says that the Jones Review occurred solely because the BBC has lots of impartiality reviews, and somehow it was Global Warming’s turn.
The alternative explanation is that the BBC has precious few impartiality reviews, the BBC realised the heat was being turned up ! – there was a great deal of criticism of its “journalism” and its pushing Global Warming right across its entire output. So they set up a patsy review by their buddy Steve Jones, a review that was laughable in its scope and conclusions. A review that invited evidence but then failed to address the detailed evidence (including the mysterious seminars) presented by Newbery and by Andrew Montford showing that there was deliberate bias as a matter of policy in the coverage of Global Warming. And that that policy had been wrongly decided, had been deliberately created by Warmists inside and ouside the BBC.
The BBC had merely circled the wagons. The objective was to get Jones to give the BBC a clean bill of health.
Which one to believe ? That the Jones Review was mere happenstance, and its conclusions fair and reasonable ?
Or that the BBC lied – at top level – about what prompted the review, and by implication about the credibility of the review. That the Jones Review was essentially a cover-up.
Newbery appears to have proved that the latter is true – the BBC at top level has lied.
These two submissions to Steve Jones where made by Mensa members.
If you google
“Global Warming on Mars and Climate Change from Space”
and
“a complaint on behalf of members of the space special interest group of mensa”
Steve Jones replied politely.
Thanks for this; I will certainly take your views into account when I write my Report.
Nothing was in the report but insults from a geneticist for the intelligence of Mensa members and scientists with relevant qualifications having their science excluded as though he remained ignorant of the growing amount of science that explains Climate Change from Space.
I read Mr Booker’s TGWF paper last night – from cover to cover. Probably some of the very best writing on the AGW scandal and the BBC’s unforgivable collusion in propagating it. It was a riveting read – written clearly and with a very subtle sense of humour. This is no uninformed sniper taking pot shots from the sidelines; Mr Booker has clearly done his research (some of the footnotes are just as engaging as the main text) and his writing reassures the reader they are in good hands.
Anyone fearful of indecipherable graphs and charts need not worry – you won’t find any here; just a lucid, clear-headed and highly informative account of some of the worst behaviour of our national broadcaster, climate scientists and NGOs in recent years, as well as some eye-opening insights into the inglorious business of promoting climate alarmism on a global scale.
I urge everyone here to go fetch themselves a copy of the free PDF – please have a read; you will laugh and you will probably use some bad language buy you will most definitely be enlightened and much better informed about how we all got to this sorry point in the story of climate alarmism.
And, Mr Booker – please turn this amazing report into a full-size book!
We’ll probably never escape this nonsense – all these committees, enquiries, charities, etc., are riddled with left-wing ideology. Whoever is appointed to chair, or take part in these things are invariably exposed after even the very basic scrutiny, to be advocates of the causes being espoused. They all have an axe to grind – self-interest, back-handers, veiled (and not so veiled) promises of promotion and/or aggrandisement, and their own pseudo-religious and political beliefs and adherence to “The Cause”.
How do you possibly identify clean, non-tainted and neutral people to serve? No wonder we think there are conspiracies in progress, there invariably are…
It’s a religion, a belief system. You’ll never get Black or Harrabin or any of the rest of them to change their minds any more than you’ll get an Iranian mullah or one of those Evangelical Christians the BBC hates so much to give up their religious beliefs.
It would call into question their self identity, their very being. There is no convincing them, there is no hope for the Trust.
The fact that the Trust reacted out of pressure from skeptics to do that report doesn’t necessarily mean it was a cover-up from the start. The fact that they hired Jones to do it, though, does mean the outcome was predetermined. I don’t think the Trust mandarins understand that they’re engaging in fraud. More likely they’re true believers (it’s peer pressure: their friends and colleagues would think less of them if they weren’t), and went with someone they trusted. Big mistake, obviously. But I’m pretty sure they literally have no idea what they’re doing.
The only possibility is to continue to disprove the bulk of the Warmist “science”, inform as much of the public as possible, and then put the case against these Beeboids. They’re ideological mouthpieces, not journalists, and this must be directed at everyone from top management to every editor and all on-air talent.
Paul Hudson probably needs a food taster these days.