The first law of journalism as told by John Humphrys…
‘First simplify, then exaggerate.’
Have to say that is pretty much the rule followed by the BBC’s climate change reporters….the refusal to take seriously any criticism of climate ‘science’, the refusal to genuinely analyse what the criticisms mean allowing the subsequent broadcasting of sweeping alarmist statements about the ‘inevitable’ consequences of global warming (despite there being little to none for 17 years) from famine, drought, island nations submerged below an ever rising sea to mass migration and war are all prime examples of Humphrys’ law in action.
‘What we are witnessing are successive distortions of the scientific message’
Humphrys has been quite vocal over the years about what a news broadcaster, a public service broadcaster, should be providing the public with, what it is duty bound to provide…….
He feels that his job is to put politicians under pressure and hold them to account. It is his duty as a broadcaster in a democracy to hold politicians to account. The BBC reporters must however report accurately, or they should lose their jobs.
Talking to the BBC’s bosses on the Select Committee on BBC Charter Review 2005 :
Q1180 Lord Maxton: Who elected you?
Mr Humphrys: Nobody elected me.
Q1181 Lord Maxton: Then why do you think you have that job?
Mr Humphrys: I have the job because I have been appointed by the BBC to do it in the most simplistic sense, but it is my job, on behalf of my listeners, and that is the important bit of the sentence if I can finish that point . . .
Mr Humphrys: It is my job on behalf of the listeners—on behalf of the listeners, I repeat—to hold people in authority and power to account, to ask those questions in other words that the listeners themselves might want to ask and it can only be a matter of judgment and frequently of course I will get it wrong—or we will get it wrong—but what we have to do if we are doing our job properly is to ask those questions that the public would like to ask of their elected representatives or the people in power but cannot because they do not have the sort of access that people like me have. I would be failing in my responsibility if I did not ask the questions they wanted asked.
From Humphrys’ MacTaggart Lecture in 2004:
I want to talk about that other vital aspect of public service broadcasting: news.
I happen to believe it is the most important thing we do. By a mile. If we get it wrong we forfeit the right to exist.
We should not be fearful of standing up to those in power. That is our job.
We should subject politicians to rigorous and relentless scrutiny. That is what the public wants and that is what the public has a right to expect.
Where do most people get most of their politics these days? Where do they see and hear politicians being tested? Most of it is on the BBC. That happens to be a fact.
We need more not less investigative journalism.
We need MUCH more straightforward political analysis. Filling a studio with people shouting at each other about the Euro is all very well, but it’s even more important to explain what the issues are.
The problem with that is firstly the journalists have to know their subject and secondly they have to approach it strictly from an impartial viewpoint without already having formed or having been given pre-conceived ideas….the problem being most don’t know their subject, and they are already convinced of, for example, climate change, based on that false or incomplete knowledge…….listen to Justin Webb bluffing his way through this interview with Nigel Lawson on climate change.
He also makes this important and highly relevant comment……
Public service broadcasting can and must make an important contribution to the democratic process. It can only do it if we are not cowed by those in power.
When you listen to what the likes of the sinister Andrew Miller MP have to say and the BBC’s lack of reaction can anyone claim the BBC is not ‘cowed by those in power’?
At the very least it has decided not to challenge whatever a politician says about climate change on the basis that ‘climate change is happening’.….despite ‘All our evidence is that, although we do not have specific evidence of climate change itself…..’
We had a look at the latest drive to enforce a climate orthodoxy upon the world…one message, all the time …..politicians were seen to be trying to control and direct what the BBC should report and who it interviews.
The sad thing is the BBC didn’t seem to object and are quite happy to propagate the government message….that is the result of the BBC taking a position rather than continuing to be journalists devoted to investigating the issues and getting to the truth..instead they accept global warming is happening and that it is man-made and from that basis they have decided not to question the new orthodoxy, and not just accept it but to go forth and promote it…..question is…what if the scientists are wrong…who will ask the questions then? Or does the circus continue as no one is left to challenge it?
The BBC’s outright acceptance of AGW allows people like MP Andrew Miller seek to block climate sceptics from the airwaves and newsprint, to intimidate and bully the sceptics….he tries to excuse his ‘McCarthyism’ by claiming the sceptics are unqualified to talk credibly on the subject of science…whereas of course he is….or is not, judged by his own standard of who is qualified.
The result of this, as intended, is to close down all debate, or rather all criticism in the media allowing politicians to ramp up the rhetoric and the taxes.
Charles Moore in the Telegraph states:
The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”.
Remember what Humphrys said about the BBC and News:
News….I happen to believe it is the most important thing we do. By a mile. If we get it wrong we forfeit the right to exist.
The trouble is it isn’t the BBC that stops existing when it gets the news wrong here….it’s freedom of speech, democracy, true science and a complete culture based on ‘CO2’ which is now classed as a pollutant to be eliminated…along with all those things that produce it such as jobs.
What Miller is saying is that regardless of the science, regardless of whether the science is right or wrong, no one should be allowed to criticise the consensus view.…baring in mind there are massive social, industrial and financial consequences to policies based upon the ‘science’ you might think that serious debate is a vital prequisite before these hugely costly projects are set in motion….projects which are mostly vanity projects upon which rest the politician’s, and the scientist’s, credibility and career prospects.
That is news in anyone’s book.
Which is why the BBC should be having as many critics of the science on as possible….if only to have those who support the science come on and refute such criticisms and confirm the science with real evidence.
It is not sufficient for the BBC to fall back on claims that there is a consensus view…it is after all only a ‘view’, only one interpretation of the science.
David Jordan, Director of Editorial Policy and Standards for the BBC, said ‘We seek to avoid equal time and status for scientists and non scientists.’
But what if a non-scientist has read the ‘science’ and found a number of critical errors or discrepancies that are obvious to anyone scientist or not….should he be silenced as Miller suggests…on the basis that he isn’t a scientist and secondly that he is undermining the momentum of the grand project by casting doubt on it?
What happens then? They ignore criticism however valid and continue regardless recklessly spending vast amounts of money to solve a problem that either doesn’t exist or is caused by something else other than the politically convenient CO2….Charles Moore spells it out again:
‘The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government.’
The truth is the greens, the scientists and the politicians desperately want man-made global warming to be true for their own reasons…allowing them to take ever more control over society and resources in the name of a cleaner, safer planet…it used to be that it was the ‘industrial/military complex’ that was the great threat to peace and freedom…always generating non-existent threats to justify the massive spending and the imposition of draconian laws…it is now, an irony, the very people who opposed that complex who are the greatest threat to society, its well being and success, using the same excuses to justify the same massive spending and draconian laws.
‘The international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU, including Britain, continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.’
The BBC’s, and the whole Media’s, job is to challenge and question the alarmist claims, not to do so allows horrendous mistakes and injustices not to mention corruption.
John Humphrys once, many times, stated that it was the BBC’s job to hold power to account:
Holding to account people in positions of power – that’s absolutely essential.
The problem is the BBC doesn’t hold power to account over climate change. They allow on a few sceptics but mainly to attempt to ridicule or undermine them….Nurse and Delingpole spring to mind. The climate lobby, scientist or not, is regarded as legitimate and credible….it is given the presumption that whatever it says is correct and true by the BBC and that any critic has a political or commercial agenda….such agendas of course are never associated with the consensus lobby….the BBC’s refusal to challenge Tim Yeo over his vested intersts and conflict of interests is the perfect, and very recent, illustration of that.
The fact the green lobby doesn’t want a debate should be raising a few, a lot of, suspicions and doubts…remember how they tried to hide their dodgy science as demonstrated by the ‘climategate’ emails….and the BBC environmental journalists went into overdrive to defend their mates at the CRU?
The fact is the science is far from settled…there is absolutely no proof that CO2 is the cause of global warming……a warming that is a possible mere 0.4°C man-made over 100 years by IPCC standards. Sure we know the ‘physics’…in a laboratory….completely different when trying to apply rules learnt in isolation in a laboratory to a complex, highly interactive climate system that is responsive to a vast, vast array of variables…..even beetles in a Canadian forest can raise the local temperature 1°C over a wide region apparently.
However when you have senior BBC journalists who have a close working relationship with the likes of the CRU, who work hand in hand with a climate propagandist, who accept money from a climate change propaganda unit, who admit they ‘have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change’, who take advice from such scientists on what line to take in their reports and programmes, you know not to take the BBC’s coverage of climate seriously.
Journalism or propaganda? It’s certainly not news tainted as it is by spin and misinformation, and it’s certainly not holding power to account….is that a public service ‘on behalf of the listeners’…or on behalf of Harrabin’s mates at the CRU?
So has the BBC ‘forfeit its right to exist’ as Humphrys might suggest?
‘The BBC reporters must however report accurately, or they should lose their jobs.’
David Rose in the Mail has an article that examines the less than democratic outcome of attitudes displayed by the new thought police typified by Andrew Miller MP with regard to who can and who can’t talk about climate change and what it is that they will be allowed to say:
The real cost of Climate McCarthyism, apart from big bills, is to free speech
At the heart of the current, poisoned debate about global warming lies a paradox. Thanks to the ‘pause’, the unexpected plateau in world surface temperatures which has now lasted for 17 years, the science is less ‘settled’ than it has been for years.
Yet, despite this uncertainty, those who use it to justify a range of potentially ruinous energy policies have become ever more extreme in their pronouncements. Their latest campaign is an attempt to silence anyone who disagrees.
This reached a new and baleful milestone last week, with a report from the Commons Science and Technology Committee saying BBC editors must obtain special ‘clearance’ before interviewing climate ‘sceptics’.
The committee’s chairman, Labour MP Andrew Miller, likened sceptics to the Monster Raving Loony Party, suggesting they should be allowed to express their views with similar frequency. High profile commentators, including the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, often describe climate change sceptics as ‘deniers’, on a par with those who reject evidence of the Holocaust.
Academics who deviate from the perceived ‘correct’ line risk vilification. The most recent example is Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who had the temerity to remove his name from a UN climate report because he said it was ‘alarmist’.
The architects of [climate] policies know they have failed, but they have no alternative except more of the same. Maybe it’s because their argument is weak that they resort to climate McCarthyism. The cost, apart from higher energy bills, is to democracy, and free speech.
A submission “The views of an independent physicist” by Professor Pierre DARRIULAT 1 to the Energy and Climate Change Committee’s inquiry about the latest conclusions of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Review (AR5)
Written evidence submitted by Professor Pierre Darriulat (IPC0049)
The inquiry recently launched by the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee was brought to my attention by colleagues of mine who encouraged me to make my views· known to the Committee.
In my opinion the main point to appreciate is that as it has the purpose of addressing policy makers, the SPM can not be a scientific document. When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and must therefore recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions, both in the mechanisms at play and in the available data; or they try to convey what they “consensually” think is the right message but at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately chose the latter option. The result is they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message asking for urgent reaction, which is quite contrary to what the scientific message conveys.
What we are witnessing are successive distortions of the scientific message of the AR5 report on the Physical Science Basis: first from the report to the SPM by those who wrote and/or amended the SPM, then from the SPM to the press by those who speak in the name of the IPCC (including the IPCC chairman) then from the press to the general public by green activists who too often behave irresponsibly in misrepresenting the findings of the work.
I totally agree that the role of journalists in a democracy is to hold those in power to account. But no single journalist will ever be impartial across a wide range of issues, no matter how hard they try to eliminate their own prejudices these are bound to have an impact on how they report some stories. When you work for a newspaper the impact of you prejudices is of no consequence because people who buy the paper choose to read stories written with a certain slant or bias. And with a free and pluralistic press you can choose from a wide set of biases. But when you work for the state funded broadcaster, which has a monopolistic position in the country, which people have to pay for whether they wish to or not, then these prejudices become of the utmost importance.
Most of the people who work for the state, or are state funded , will over time become advocates of state funding and hence bigger government. The employees of the BBC are no exception.
Therefore, it seems to me that a state funded broadcaster, particularly one which has become a monopoly, cannot serve the people of a democracy impartially. So the BBC should be abolished or at broken into smaller entities which have to survive with no state funding. The market would then ensure that we got the pluralistic news and comment that a democracy needs and people could choose which set of bias and prejudices they wished to buy, listen to and watch.
I can see no defence for the state funded BBC’s existence whatsoever, indeed I believe that by Humprey’s own arguments it cannot serve the British people well.
This is a very good article, but you’ve missed out what I’ve come to believe is a deliberate BBC policy on CAGW – when presenting the warmist position they interview scientists who support the “consensus” but for the seceptic view they choose non scientists. This allows them to claim that scientists support CAGW and that sceptics are non scientists.
If they wanted a debate to inform viewers/listeners they could call on Spencer, Lintzen, Pielke or a host of others (you mention Tol), but that would mean admitting that there were scientists among the sceptics, and that would undermine the CAGW propaganda message.
Apropos climate change, I decided at the beginning of March to try to establish the accuracy of the weather forecasts. My method is very crude, but it gives me an indication of accuracy. I have put the 7day forecast in a few words onto my calendar and each day review it with actuality. I haven’t used the Met Office because I don’t trust it, being part of the AGW scam as it is. So, after one month, the preliminary indication is that roughly a third of each daily forecasts are reflected in the outcome. Interestingly, the ‘correct’ forecasts don’t occur at the beginning of each 7day forecast, but rather appear to be randomly distributed throughout each period. What do I conclude from this? Well, if they can’t forecast 7 days from now, what chance do they have forecasting a year from now, let alone a decade or a century?
As with other “forecasts” and “predictions” of history, recent and otherwise, the fact that most of them failed miserably is conveniently forgotten about, as will their current predictions of the climatic future.
However, the predictions of “doomsday” scenarios and “catastrophic” events, are sufficiently for a time far enough in the future to guarantee that the perpetrators of these scares, will either be comfortably retired in exotic places (not yet overrun by the alleged “rising sea levels”), or dead. They’ll never have to seriously account for their past, they never do.
They’re not completely stupid – they merely think that we are.
It’s not even that they can’t forecast 7 days out, john, your analysis indicates that there isn’t even any better confidence in their one-day-out forecasts.
What bothers me most of all is that the models used by the climate change propagandists have, almost in every case, failed to actually predict the past 18 years, but they still think it’s criminal to not have the answer as to wghy that might be the case – so now they’ve declared that the ‘missing heat’ is lying in the ocean depths – once again despite any clear evidence of this being available.
Hmm – now they are saying that, despite the lack of any actual convincing evidence (man-made CO2 causing ‘global warming,’ anyone ?), it must be true – so there ! Right let’s spend billions more on our research and inconsequential ‘climate change’ activities – the science is decided.
There was a point that Peter Lilly made, which is how Astronomers are able to predict Eclipses.
You use the most up-to-date hardware, software and ideas, and then you use the oldest data available.
This means that they could use computer models with starting points in 1984, with that you could then make a one hundred year prediction, with the advantage that you could validate the first thirty years with observations.
Why do you think that only Peter Lilly has thought of that, is it because all the climate scientists that belong to the consensus are morons?
I see from your chart of News Sources that the BBC’s favourite ‘organs’ The Guardian and The Independent are so unpopular that they are off the scale.
Yet, to reiterate the point you are making, and offer an interesting counterpoint to the BBC’s justification of who gets mentioned (or not) on various topics based on what or who they represent, it seems intriguing just how often and for how long how many Graun or Indy ‘correspondents’ enjoy extensive BBC air time to voice their points of view.
One can only presume to explain this something else got ‘settled’ behind what is doubtless a strenuously-defended Hugs FoI wall.
I wonder what?
Great article-especially the Humphrys humbugger quotes…if his job is to ask the questions that we in the pub would like asked…how come he`s yet to ask one in all those years he`s squatted over public life?
Humphrys is a failed organic farmer like Himmler-but with more air miles…especially when he needs to water his olive vines back in Greece come June (when he`ll create a confection on austerity in Thessalonican Social Services, just so he can get out there at taxpayer expense).
Pompous ass…what he says would be true if he ever was not “too chicken to even try it”(St Joseph Of Strummer).
No dignity-just dignitas!
Near on 60% of Public Truth comes from the one sewer pipe then?
And no monopoly, or need to cut the knotweed of the blasted BBC?
Only a Harman/Dromey would back that…and their spineless toothless politicos that balance them like Heseltine and Miller.
From Churchill to Miller in three generations is it?….well done Tories!
Don’t forget good people that a 7 day forecast is not an indication to Climate. Don’t fall into the trap that the BBC has by reporting every unusual weather happenstance as *Climate Change*. Unusual weather phenomena happens all the time around the World and the BBC just love this to happen so they can promote the new orthodoxy and link it into *Climate Change* when there is no evidence to support that *Climate Change* has caused the weather phenomenon. In nearly all cases of this happenstance, it is of a local nature and therefore absolutely nothing to do with *Climate Change*.
Any change in climate can only be viewed over a protracted period of time and not viewed, as the BBC does, by local weather events which might be a 1 in 100 years event and along the M4 corridor.
A failure to predict what the weather will do in a period of 7 days, is a local forecast and if they get it wrong, then it shows what a pi** poor Chief Forecaster the Met Office has at the time!
All scientist know that the Climate always changes. The problem is that as in Nazi Germany, the scientists of the prevailing political ideology are put in authority, and with that authority, they form gangs or panels of a hundred or so politicalised scientists who decree such bogus consensuses, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity is bullshit, or in the case of Climate Change, they produce a bogus rebuttal of the Svensmark theory.
Further to my comments above re Humphrys spouting cliches that he will never dare to act upon as long as his pension is on offer.
His “interview” with the son of one of Enniskillens murder victims at the Remembrance Day service in 1987.
As the IRA apologist in Belfast bullshitted away and the “BBCs own Peter Taylor” cringed and cavilled for McGuinness…it took the victims son to ask the only questions that mattered…and he struggled to get them in over Humphrys stonewalling and seeming inability to hear them.
Still-devastating results ensued….apparently saying sorry for the murders is for wimps,,,Peter taylor said this “The IRA can`t say sorry…well they can but they won`t”.
QED…yet the British Army and the Unionists will be called upon to kow tow to Gerry, Martin and the New Power Generation of thugs who`ll be still wanting that United Ireland that Ireland itself won`t touch with a barge pole.
They saw Gerry Adams on RTE in November last year as he squirmed over Mrs McConville and HIS role in that atrocity…he`s toast!
But forever a pop tart as far as the BBC is concerned.
Next time Humphrys goes all bumptious about holding power accountable to the listener…remember that it was the Unionist whose dad had been butchered by the IRA that had to struggle past the BBCs finest to ask the IRA shill the only questions that history cared of….and he got more revelations from the IRA/BBC mindset that a lifetime of Humphrys and Paxmans.
“They can`t say sorry-well they could, but they won`t”
Next on was the Met Office Global Boiling Bunny-and as with Maria Miller-this phrase of Peter Taylors( a result of Barrys questions over Humphrys protests) will hopefully be on their tombstones very soon.
– But BBCr4Feedback the actual complaints prog is one of those progs owned by BBC Eco-warriors “If 97% of complaints were sceptical, they still only air the 3%:from DramaGreens”
– Yes I have complained many times ..week before last weeks, there were 6 errors ..e.g. a presenter just accepted a listeners assertion that there had been a 6m sea level rise in Chennai in the last 20 years (actually its more like 3mm) ..but Feedback ignored me & played 3 alarmists complaining about False Balance again.
my full Discussion on Bishop-Hill
‘Feedback ignored me & played 3 alarmists complaining about False Balance again.’
Must be nice to control the pre-pro, host, guests, questions, edit and, of course, the complaints process meant to cover them if they err.
Given a fact that doesn’t suit, it is little wonder they wandered off to locate some nice waffle to support their supposed balance dilemma.