Former BBC science reporter David Whitehouse explains with masterful precision here why BBC science journalism has turned into sychophantic political drivel. Basically, Mr Whitehouse says that the corporation should be challenging eveything it hears from scientists; instead it is recycling their words as if they were gospel. To me, the most telling blow is when he compares science reporting now to how political reporting used to be in the 1950s before Robin Day and the young Turks at ITN broke the mould.
Proof that he’s right is not hard to find in today’s wearisome quota of alarmist propaganda put out by the posse of so-called BBC science correspondents. Here Richard Black continues his strident eco-tub thumping from Durban, his homily this morning based on a slavish regurgitation of a press release from an outfit called ECOFYS, a group of eco-whack subsidy looters who are busy fuelling Chris Huhne’s insatiable desire to cover the United Kingdom with bird-slicing rotor blades. And here, one of Mr Black’s colleagues, Joanthan Amos, feeds the world-is-melting frenzy with a piece of recycled pap from another alarmist boondoggle, this one the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
BBC “science” reporters: strenuously working to peddle you unfiltered alarmist propaganda from freebies everywhere.