Thanks to Stewgreen [and Craig at Is the BBC biased? Is there any doubt?] for pointing this out to us…
How could you help people take collective action on climate change?
For this year’s #EditorsLab Final at the Global Editors Network conference in Barcelona, the teams were set the challenge of coming up with new ways to report on the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Our BBC team was made up of a journalist (me), designer Tom Nurse and developer Sam French. We were asked to build a prototype to engage audiences and innovate coverage on the issues.
We wanted to look at goal number 13, which is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The idea we settled on was to look at using the News website’s real-time analytics data to show readers the potential impact of collective action.
The UK government wants to reduce C02 emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Consumers will have to make some radical changes to their behaviour if we are to reach that goal.
Most people understand the climate problems and are concerned about them, but they feel helpless as individuals. We wanted to show in a dynamic way that together our audience could have an impact: “If you were one of 300,000 people on the website now and you all changed your behaviour, what would that mean? How much C02 could you save?”
Nothing unexpected there….a continuation of Roger Harrabin’s project to get the BBC to disseminate climate change propaganda throughout its programming to deliver subconscious messages that influence the audiences’ perceptions and reactions.
Always interesting to see it in black and white though..and it also led to the discovery of BBC Newslabs….
Founded in 2012, BBC News Labs is an innovation incubator charged with driving innovation for BBC News. We are part of Connected Studio – the pan-BBC Innovation Programme.
Now no surprise that the BBC wants to improve its journalism, its honesty, accuracy and reach, or as they put it to ‘to support & accelerate the News Industry’….the question is, is that what BBC News Labs is all about or is it being used to develope ways of presenting news to the public in order to deliver a very particular message?
Judging by this project, The 19 Million Project, the aim is to mislead the audience, engage and exploit their emotions and harness that by skewing the debate on immigration so that it favours mass immigration, and opening the borders to uncountable numbers of refugees…..that’s not news, that’s campaigning…
Status: active
Break from traditional conventions of journalism and communications to develop radical new ways to share the narrative of the refugee crisis.
3 Team members from BBC News Labs are participating in the first part of The 19 Million Project – an 11-day combination of a Hack Event and an Education Summit.
This event brings together journalists, developers, designers, academics, government and business leaders and human rights organisations from the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to explore how Europe’s pressing refugee crisis came to be, and what can be done to best address it.
From the 19 Million Project team:
We are a coalition of journalists, coders, designers, digital strategists, and global citizens. We are coming together to address the spiraling crisis of the estimated 19 million people a year who are forced to flee their countries and risk their lives as they attempt to escape persecution, conflict and war.
We are committed to finding innovative ways to advance the narrative around this human rights crisis–and explore how the latest technology and digital storytelling methods can improve the reporting and drive global action to address this tragedy.
So the project wants to drive global action, and from the language you can work out exactly what they want the ‘globe’ to do….read their micro biogs here.
Editor of The 19 Million Project. I want to bring my experience in journalism to highlight the problems with migration and pledge for policy change around the world.
No more Aylan.
‘No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land’
I firmly believe that a refugee-centered design approach is needed.
I was deceived by the coverage of the refugee crisis by legacy media: something was missing: human beings.
Not sure why the BBC needs this massive project….their old standby of ‘The tears of a child say more than any words can ever do’ has always been the BBC’s fallback….tearjerking, emotive pictures of kids crying and their mothers looking downbeat and despairing through the Hungarian fascist’s razorwire usually does the job.
The BBC giving the migrants a helping hand…is that the BBC’s job? Is that what we give them the licence fee for?….
Project Idea
First steps in a new country – a refugee’s guide book.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of a refugee for a second.
Imagine you just got out of a train in Munich, Germany, what do you do?
Take your own country, assume no prior knowledge and search information about the most basic logistic steps upon your arrival. Try.
Certainly the questions most refugees have a similar and we can help them answer them. We propose to aggregate a page with per-country-information on immigration procedure, contact addresses, housing, work.
We propose to collect this information, from official (government pages) in each country and provide it in a simple, concise format in several languages. While Refugee Info provides help during the journey to Europe, we want to provide help in the next step: Once you arrived where you wanted to be, what now?
Desired product: A simple website, in several relevant languages, which provides basic logistic information for newly arrived refugees in each European country. This page should be able to evolve and expand beyond the event – so let’s do that properly!
Apart from the government, numerous charities, NGO’s and campaign groups that are there to help refugees why does a news organisation think it is its job to provide guides that can only encourage immigrants to come here by facilitating that and making them believe life is going to be far easier than it might be?
Shouldn’t the BBC News stick to news and not become some sort of embassy for aspiring migrants?
If only they would try and change these failing countries rather than conspire in the failure of ours.
It’s good to see them use the words narrative and storytelling in the same paragraph. In my opinion that’s all the bbc do these days, make up stories; one definition of the word narrative is story. At least now it’s out in the open.
‘Project Idea’
Imagine you just got out of a train in Munich Germany, what do you do?
I would imagine possibly exactly what they did in Cologne!
JimS
Absolutely correct – lefty media only deal with the consequences and products of problem countries, rarely the root cause – and we are not just talking about Syria etc.- The African continent is strewn with corrupt black governments that rob their people of wealth (eg oil, diamonds, copper etc) I have worked in probably half of these countries and have seen the poverty first hand. How many BBC stories does one see about black African corruption? How many black African Leaders were named by BBC/Guardian in regard to the Panama Papers? They won’t touch these stories because they don’t have the balls.
It could be a form of racism , not expecting black Africans to have the same standards as most of us.
The government gets huge amounts of money – in the UK in the trillions. As far as all politicians are concerned,, this money is for them to dispose off as they please.
As hardly any of them have made real wealth, they simply assume it grows on trees, and give it away they think best. African dictators and even people in the UK, get large amounts of this money, extorted out of people who have worked hard, and taken risks, to earn that money. To them, to see their money go to corrupt politicians, who then stack it away in offshore accounts, must be galling.
Why would we want to “save” carbon dioxide? If we produce enough of it, we’ll be OK! After all, they believe that we produce too much of it. Should we be saving it for later, and was this the thinking behind the much vaunted and useless carbon capture and storage venture?
Climate change is just that, it happens, has happened, and will continue to happen, despite what we may believe, think, or do, and long may it continue.
Can I save my Carbon dioxide in an offshore account? Do I have to freeze it, or can I loan the CO2 to some poor African plant, who may be in need of it.
Just proves that BBC Journalists are Green Activists and of inferior intelligence to the average viewer.
Journalism was once about informing the public about information discovered by Journalists. BBC Journalism is now about Political activism on trying to get people to solve problems that they now realise do not exist.
The Guardian reading employees at the BBC do not seem to have the intellectual ability to realise how much better informed people are by reading other sources of information about this scientific scam.
The mindless irrelevant questions, leading to even more mindless irrelevant questions, means that as an Astronomer and Mensa Member, I am unable to answer these weird moronic questions from BBC Journalists. If scientists try, then the BBC moron would only conclude that they where denying that the Climate changes.
The BBC Climate Change propaganda does not work because it is a contradictory mess of mindless top down information from scientifically unqualified activists who never correct any mistakes that they make, and give the viewer the impression that they have memory loss. In fact they seem to not need any memory at all, just belief in Man-Made Carbon Dioxide induced Global Warming, with memory loss producing a continuation of belief in this after 1997, and producing a reduction in the language from:
(1) Man-Made Carbon Dioxide induced Global Warming, to
(2) Carbon Dioxide induced Global Warming, to
(3) Global Warming, to
(4) Climate Change, to
(5) Climate, to
(6) Hopefully, complete memory loss
We are committed to finding innovative ways to advance the narrative around this human rights crisis–and explore how the latest technology and digital storytelling methods can improve the reporting and drive global action to address this tragedy.
I can give them an ‘innovative way’. Divert the trillions being wasted on ‘climate change’ and spend it on helping refugees (the genuine ones, not economic migrants) with decent shelter and subsistence as near to their homelands as possible so that when things have settled down the trillions can also be spent helpng rebuild their cities and homelands so they can return.
However it is clear from the above the BBC’s idea of ‘innovation’ is simply finding new and devious methods of promoting their mass immigration agenda and not finding new solutions to the actual problem, which in most instances has Islam as its root cause.