Category Archives: James Painter

One of the BBC’s main climate change propagandists, James Painter (whose work I reported here,) has prepared a so-called survey (funded by Reuters) on the media’s coverage of the Copenhagen climate change shindig last year, which – it seems – was astonishingly attended by more than 4,000 journalists. His main purpose – as befits a seasoned corporation econut crusader – is to bewail the fact that in 400 articles surveyed, “the science” was not properly reported, that some journalists dared to question the certainty that there is a climate crisis, that that too much credence was given to Climategate (which, incidentally, broke almost exactly a year ago), and that the real message of the event – that the world must be ruled by the UN, endure more taxes, stop burning oils, and slide into serious economic poverty – was lost.

I could go on, but those are the main facts of this useless but chilling document. What it underlines yet again is that BBC staff are up their gills in the political process of disseminating alarmism; the fact that Mr Painter (aided and abetted by the unbiquitous Richard Black) has written this report is proof positive that his main concern, as the Cancun phase of the climate alarmism approaches, is to affect greenie change by propaganda. It will be very interesting to see whether the BBC Trust – who are currently assessing the corporation’s science coverage, and have received this excellent submission from the Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky websites – can spot the constant dissembling, spinning and contortionism being perpetrated so blatantly by BBC staff.

Here’s another BBC warming fanatic. He’s James Painter, who for the past decade has been filing warming alarmist stories from his beat in his various roles as BBC World Service Spanish American editor and Miami bureau chief. He came to my my attention because he’s led the field in reporting alleged climate change related drought problems in the Amazon, one of the areas where the IPCC report has been found to be discredited; Richard North reveals today why it’s bunk.

He’s now moved on to become a lecturer and research fellow at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, but this is partly funded by the BBC and he is still a BBC Latin American analyst, filing stories on the impact of drought and the shrinking of glaciers. So Mr Painter remains a BBC man through and through. He is clearly of that BBC breed that believes climate change is a crusade. He recently gave the annual keynote lecture to the Society of Latin American Studies. It’s well worth a careful read because his speech is a case study of the extent to which bias has infected every aspect of BBC journalism in this area. He says:

To summarise then, climate change is happening, it’s happening faster than expected, and it will have a huge impact on Latin America. Of course there are all sorts of scientific uncertainties, but uncertainty should not be an excuse for lack of coverage in the media. In the same way that climate adaptation policies have to be incorporated into governments’ development strategies, global warming as an issue has to be mainstreamed into the media.

Basically, this fanatic believes that 90% of scientists accept global warming, and therefore the views of sceptics should not be reported; that the Arctic is melting, that the Amazon will be badly affected by drought , and vast parts of South America will become desert. He thinks also that the 2007 IPCC report did not go far enough:

…there is plenty of evidence to suggest that by some key performance indicators – the rate of warming, the rate of melt in some parts of the world and the rise in GHG accumulation – real-world changes are at the upper bound or beyond the worst-case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) last year.

The main thrust of his argument is that media organisations must stop reporting other news, and focus their main efforts on climate change. I’ve noted before that if you scratch the surface of the nature of BBC journalism, you find that it’s actually a propaganda machine, and that almost every reporter that is examined is actually a political activist. Mr Painter fits that profile; the tragedy is that he clearly believes – from the tone of his lecture – that’s he’s an objective reporter. He’s not, he’s a peddler of snake oil.