NOT THE GOOD GUYS

Robert Peston, as the Mail on Sunday pointed out today, is a media whore, happy to quaff the champagne and extensive private hospitality of Elisabeth Murdoch, and huddle conspiratorially there with his long-time buddy Will Lewis, the group general manager of News International. At the same time he has broken a strong of so-called revelations about the hacking affair, the latest of which has been posted this afternoon. Despite this clear concern about his position, the BBC are continuing to flaunt his works. He comments that the arrest of Rebekah Brooks is very bad news indeed for News Corp. Any journalistic organisation worth its salt and with any integrity would have quietly pushed him to the sidelines because of the clear conflict of interest. But not, of course, the BBC – it’s pretending as usual that because this story was in the Mail, it is left-wing garbage.

Meanwhile, Autonomous Mind, as ever with a very interesting slant on developments, spells out that back in 2003, the US journalist Michael Gonzalez, visiting the UK to report the aftermath of the David Kelly affair, spotted the real Guardian-BBC agenda: to smash forever News Corp so it would be free to dominate the UK with its liberal-left agenda. Nothing has changed, except now the BBC scents real blood and all its dogs – including Mr Peston – have been slipped from their leashes and are out to savage the Murdoch domain until the bitter end. Make no mistake, this is a battle for press freedom – and the BBC are not the good guys, blurred as some moral boundaries may be.

AGENDA DRIVEN

Further to David Preiser’s post about the BBC’s use of an apocryphal quote in a far from subtle article on media barons, here’s one of the co-authors of that piece on Twitter yesterday:

Last week the BBC ran another De Castella article in which he attacked the News of the World for daring to quote Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder in its final edition.

And they have the nerve to call others “agenda driven“.

SINGING FROM THE WRONG HYMN SHEET

Christine Rice on Woman”s Hour (mp3)

Hat tip to Millie Tant in the comments for drawing our attention to Jenni Murray’s interview with mezzo-soprano Christine Rice on Thursday’s Woman’s Hour. At one point Dame Jenni asked Rice about her pre-singing career researching “global warming”, and I don’t think the response was quite what was expected. The singer recounted her disillusionment with the field of climate change studies, which she described as “the buzz subject… with a lot of money”:

I was amazed really by the inadequacy of what we had, because we’re talking about climate change which is over tens of thousands of years as opposed to the twenty years of data that we had. So in a way we were putting out a lot of ideas and not really having concrete scientific research to support it, and I suppose at that point I did lose a little bit of my spark, thinking well I could propose an idea and I could probably draft a thesis that would support it and yet I wouldn’t really convince myself necessarily.

At this point Murray changed the subject.

It would be fascinating to know how many other people have turned their backs on a career in science because they didn’t want to play the climate change game. The wilful lack of curiosity displayed by Murray suggests it’s not the sort of investigation that would interest the BBC though.

HERO OF THE HOUR

Let’s be clear. The EU Common Fisheries is a disaster that has wrecked the UK fishing fleet, created and has condoned for decades the practice of “discards” (EU-speak for compelling fishermen to throw billions of edible dead fish back into the sea) and has facilitated the systematic pillaging of UK fish stocks by rapacious French and Spanish fishermen. But for the BBC, which has under-and mis-reported EU affairs ever since it played a decisive role in rigging the 1975 EEC referendum, the European Commission is now the hero of the hour. It’s going to get rid of discards and reform the fishing policy to prevent “over-fishing”. As usual in this farce of reporting, there’s nothing from those who have been hurt by EU’s dictatorial, fascist meddling. All that counts is the view of greenies who want to perpetuate the lie that it’s the fishermen who are to blame.

HIDING THE TRUTH

How disingenuous, twisting and obfuscatory can the BBC get? This report about our government’s eco-nut plans to wreck the UK economy and force millions into fuel poverty suggests that the corporation will tie itself in any number of knots to not report the truth. Avoid-the-points Huhne’s bill is part of the government’s slow, deliberate act of national economic suicide, and its systematic plans to give massive subsidies to the rich by robbing the poor. The headline should be “Insane climate minister pours £110bn of our cash down the drain”. Instead, it is put across – exactly as the minister decreed – as an “investment”.

Everyone in government is momentarily obsessed with the sideshow of Murdoch-baiting. But it’s a diversion – the tragedy is that as the MPs engage in a mammoth show of self-righteous, hypocritical indignation, head cases like Huhne are getting on with their vicious, ideological sequestration of our cash. And the BBC is letting them get away with it by hiding the truth. Jo Nova, by contrast, gives the facts that Mr Huhne and his government henchmen so carefully ignore.

POISON TOSH

This latest posting from Phil Mercer in the Australian economic suicide story shows a superficial semblance of balance. He reports that proposals for the tax have “split the nation”, and quotes opposition leader Tony Abbott claiming that the tax is “socialism masquerading as environmentalism”, with another MP weighing in that the tax will destroy what’s left of Oz manufacturing industry.

But as usual, the devil is in the detail. What Mr Mercer carefully doesn’t report is this (from Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper):

Labor’s primary vote fell three percentage points to a record low of 27 per cent, while the Coalition’s support rose three points to 49 per cent for its highest primary vote since the Howard government in October 2001.

What he also doesn’t mention is that the Australian top 25 companies lost £7bn in share prices a single day after the tax was announced and that the measures will stop global temperatures rising by only 1/14,000 C°.

Against that absence, Mr Mercer gives oodles of space to the usual greenie claptrap from prime minister Julia Gillard (without a scintilla of balance) that the measures are vital to save us from freezing, boiling, drowning, dying of thirst and choking to death. He also includes, of course, the usual eco-fanatic clarion call that no matter what Ms Gillard does, it’s not enough.

And above all, he perpetuates the myth with compulsory BBC zeal that CO2 is “pollution”, and those who create wealth are “worst polluters”. What utter, poisonous tosh.

BLACK DISRESPECT…

There’s no doubt whose side the BBC is on in Julia Gillard’s attempts to force her country into economic suicide by taxing “carbon” output. Australia is a “worst polluter”, so of course such measures are right. A picture of horrendous, belching CO2 (actually, most likely steam, but never mind – the message has to be rammed home by the BBC thought police) has been carefully selected to show just how bad it is. Yes, opposition leader Tony Abbott is quoted and it is made clear that 60% of electors also oppose the measures, but the thrust of the story is that coal-guzzling Aussies must take their medicine and Miss Gillard is a saint.

Meanwhile, Richard Black continues his vicious campaigning to discredit the hated deniers. Here, in a pile of statistical gobledeygook and obfuscation, he turns his fire on that nasty rag the Daily Mail and mentions specifically a story carried last week by someone he calls Christopher Brooker which had the effrontery to challenge the idea that we would all be frying but for Chinese aerosol particles. I posted on the story last week to show how biased the BBC’s coverage was.

Actually, Mr Black, it is Christopher Booker. I’ve been reading his journalism and his books for more than 40 years, and I would venture to suggest that he knows more about his craft in his little finger than you do at all. Here, in case you missed it, is his latest piece on the zealotry that you espouse; I would also recommend you read this – his sharp, knowledgeable book on the massive scam that your are perpetrating with such venom. Next time, though, if you want to attack such targets, at least use your spellcheck. And show some respect.

HARD FACTS

Autonomous Mind explains brilliantly why the closure of the News of the World is a triumph for the BBC-Guardian axis. Meanwhile Roger Harrabin continues to pump out greenie untruths which are making us all seriously poorer and show the power of the liberal-left media class. As usual, he ignores the real facts – a quarter of Brits live in fuel poverty as energy bills rocket.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Compare and contrast the way that Richard Black – the current BBC so-called environment correspondent- and David Whitehouse, a former BBC science reporter who, unlike Richard, actually has a science degree, handle a report which shows that – despite all the fanatical outpourings of greenies – there has been little significant warming since 1998. Mr Black is red hot keen at the very beginning of his report to savage sceptics who have “denied” global warming, because actually, he asserts, it’s all an illusion: the lull was caused by Chinese coal burning, which emitted sulphur particles that, in turn, reflected heat back into space. Mr Whitehouse, for his part focuses on the science, and concentrates instead on the devsatating impact the report has – and I’m going to quote him almost in full to show just how partisan Mr Black is and to convey what the real story is:

It is good news that the authors recognise that there has been no global temperature increase since 1998. Even after the standstill appears time and again in peer-reviewed scientific studies, many commentators still deny its reality. We live in the warmest decade since thermometer records began about 150 years ago, but it hasn’t gotten any warmer for at least a decade.

The researchers tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result. They do not use the latest data on the sun’s influence on the Earth, rendering their results of academic interest only.

They blame China’s increasing coal consumption that they say is adding particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and therefore cool the planet. The effect of aerosols and their interplay with other agents of combustion is a major uncertainty in climate models. Moreover, despite China’s coal burning, data indicate that in the past decade the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere has not increased.

The researchers seek to explain the temperature standstill between 1998 and 2008. They say that the global temperature has increased since then.

This is misleading. There was an El Nino in 2010 (natural cyclic warming) but even that did not raise temperatures above 1998. In fact the standstill has continued to 2010 and 2011 appears to be on course to be a cooler year than any of the preceding ten years.

Tweaking computer models like this proves nothing. The real test is in the real world data. The temperature hasn’t increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.
Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out of date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.

As usual, Richard Black, by contrast, goes on to give acres of space to the alarmists he habitually speaks to, in the way he usually speaks to them, and bends over backwards to convey that – without question – the report shows that we are all going to fry.