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B-BBC contributor David Jones asked me to look into BBC connections in this story, that the UN has established a whole new machinery to ensure that its line on biodiversity alarmism is properly reported. In this instance, I can find no obvious smoking gun. But there are inevitably some BBC links. One of the key organisations that the UN is using to enforce its groupthink is the International Institute for Environment and Development (often quoted by Richard Black). In turn, the IIED is a a key supporter of the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP), which exists to indoctrinate journalists about both climate change and biodiversity. On the board of CCMP is – suprise, surprise, an ex BBC environment reporter (Mr Harrabin’s predecessor) Alex Kirby. As his wiki biography shows, he now works on developing “media training skills” among NGOs, as well as continuing to work for the BBC on a freelance basis. He was a pioneer of alarmist reporting about climate and biodiversity, as this feature shows.

Also listed as a key member of CCMP is Mark Harvey, whom I know was an employee for many years of the Television Trust for the Environment(TVE), which I have mentioned before on this blog – they are a favoured supplier to the BBC of greenie propaganda, linked in turn closely with the BBC World Service Trust, the primary purpose of which is also to spread greenie propaganda, and train journalists how to do so.

Indirect links, maybe, but they illustrate that the BBC is entwined to some extent with the UN’s own propaganda machine. And my bet is that behind the scenes, BBC staff are working flat out to assist the UN’s goals. These people work together and feed off each other.

Robin Shepherd is one of the most articulate of Israel’s supporters. As he’s not Jewish, a single word from him counts, in the eyes of the world, as twice that of a Jew, so the BBC should sit up and take notice.
He understands only too well the way the BBC misrepresents the complexities of the I/P conflict, leaving out essential information while maintaining a semblence of the impartiality it is obliged to display.

Here is his analysis of Barbara Plett’s BBC article about anti Israel campaigner Richard Falk’s report to the UN General Assembly.

In one corner, in apocalypse terms, is the white horse, representing evil, in the form of Barbara Plett, famous for her emotional outburst at Yassir Arafat’s departure, in a helicopter, to die. On the red horse (war) is Richard Falk, well known for associating Israel’s “treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity”, not to mention some odd views on 9/11.
Number three, black, representing famine, is the UN – always ready willing and able to condemn Israel for anything and everything while ignoring terrible misdemeanours of other countries. In the final corner astride the pale horse which stands for ‘death’, is the BBC, which is obsessed with denigrating Israel, whilst praising the Palestinians and showering Islam and the Muslim world with admiration.
What a formidable quartet.

Robin Shepherd understands how it works. Barbara Plett’s article ignores Falk’s biased political agenda. Basic good journalistic practice obliges the BBC to provide context and sufficient information to “ help the reader understand precisely why Israel and the rest of us should treat his words with something less than the reverence they are accorded by the BBC.” Barbara Plett sees no need for that. The travesty of ‘balance’ consists of:
“Israel said (Falk’s) report was utterly biased and served a political agenda, criticising its author for making no mention of what it called Palestinian terrorist attacks”.
So, now they do mention Falk’s political agenda, belatedly, in such a way as to dismiss it as Israel’s fabrication, and they also imply that Palestinian terrorist attacks are a fantasy, an exaggeration and a matter of opinion.
Do read Robin Shepherd’s article to get the full picture. He concludes:

“You can bet your house that Barbara Plett and the editorial team that helped produce this story have no inkling at all that they have violated what should be considered basic journalistic standards and practices. In their world, their behaviour is reasonable and normal. And so, they would argue, is Richard Falk.”

I’m getting bored with keeping track of BBC greenie/environment/climate alarmism nonsense – there are so many stories, so much rubbish, so many inane, insane claims, that each report I file here is looking and sounding like more of the same. Black, Harrabin (though he has been keeping a low profile of late) Kinver & co seem to be under instructions to provide a torrent of one-sided propaganda, so much so that I have no doubt that this is being coordinated. They are like the Terminator androids, capable of self-repairing and continuing with their pre-programmed, lunatic mission no matter what happens. The latest is wearisomly here; it’s going to get warmer by 4 degrees C over the next century (the models say so), so a bunch of loony scientists have constructed 20 big saucers (sorry, “replicated ecosystems” in the language of the green religion) and have studied what happens at different temperatures. Why they need to do this, I do not know (or care), because I think any child would tell you that plant and animal life is different in a lake in tropical Africa from one in Canada. But hey-ho, this is science grant money, so it can be sprayed around like champagne on the Grand Prix winners’ podium.

As usual Mark Kinver reports the whole farce with reverential tones, ignoring obvious countervaling arguments such as this. Actually, in this case, those involved in this “research” acknowledge that they don’t know what they’ve proved with their saucers, but the irony is totally lost on Mr Kinver.

My question to myself (and you) this morning is whether I continue to write about this drivel. Part of me says that logging the lies is important, another that it’s like shooting ducks in a barrel, and that the nonsense has become so obvious and so absurd that it’s pointless to chronicle it. Nothing will stop it. It’s daily, it’s there, it’s relentless, it’s a campaign to indoctrinate us. I have come to see the BBC as a gigantic Trabant, trundling on but oblivious to the parody it has become. Yet the stuff it spews out is dangerous. Our political class and our schoolkids are totally on board (as the normally mild-mannered Harmless Sky blog testifies today). It’s a religion of divisiveness, of fascism and of hate (towards the human race); every bit as loathsome and cynical as Nazism.

Give a number of climate alarmist monkeys a typewriter, and inevitably, in due course, they will come up with new, ever more fantastical, predictions about how we are all going to suffer. Here, yet again, the BBC is giving full throttle to a doomster weather forecast, this time that there are going to be more mudslides on the railway network because it will be drier and wetter. It makes a change, I suppose, from leaves on the line, or that persistent wrong kind of snow. But who do these clowns think they are, especially as such projections are based on suspect models and slanted climate records, and thus can easily be debunked as a load of baloney.

Of course, the BBC takes not one jot of notice of the flaws, and it does not ask whose money is being wasted in these hot air exercises. If the Cleggerons halted all the expenditure on alarmism and put it instead into more jail places, Britain would be a lot better place!

The boys and girls in the BBC biodiversity political movement are in full scale production. Here’s Mark Kinver telling us that cemeteries are perfection in promoting biodiversity, even in nasty industrial places like Manchester (moral let’s kill more people?). I can’t quite see the news angle, but what does news matter if you are on a crusade? If that doesn’t drive the message home, try David Shukman, who has been sent to Kenya again to tell us that without tree-worship, Kenyans and Africans are doomed. Again, the news line is pretty deeply buried here, but that’s never stopped Mr Shukman from his prophet-of-doom lecturing. Or what about this? Here four, nice, unbiased observers like the population control freak Jonathan Porritt and Richard Black’s chum zooologist Jonathan Baillie (a guest speaker recently at the BBC College of Journalism) are given their own platform to pontificate that biodiversity is like Daz (! – of course it is). Or try this, another gem from the prolific propagandist Mark Kinver. Salmon are losing in Spain their unique genetic characteristics because of nasty climate change. If that doesn’t persuade you, we can go to Richard Black himself, who has a pearl of a quote from to buttress his campaigning, from a UN aparatchik in Japan who warns us that we inherited a world full of gold from nature, but we are cutting it down. And last, but not least, don’t forget Martin Patience. He tells us from China that China’s environment and biodiversity have paid an enormous price for economic growth.

In all this astonishing torrent of biodiversity madness there’s – as usual – not a breath of a mention of any other perspective. Such as this. All that matters to the BBC is the relentless greenie rush to tell that us that man is selfish, that nasty capitalism is to blame, and that we must all become eco-freak tree huggers.

George wants to hear from you!

As I have suspected would happen, now that there are more and more problems in the climate change crusade, the BBC is increasingly shifting its emphasis on the intensifying push to introduce world government to ensure biodiversity. The UN convention that is frantically studying this topic in order to extract as much political cpaital as possible is meeting in Japan, and Richard Black is of course there at our expense. This is what he concludes:

Many experts believe it is necessary if scientific evidence on the importance of biodiversity loss is to be transmitted effectively to governments, in the same way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assembles evidence that governments can use when deciding whether to tackle climate change.

What he doesn’t say, of course, is that many competent (but less political) experts maintain the opposite: that his carefully chosen glass half empty phrases, such as “deforestation”, and “species extinction”, are a load of alarmist cobblers. I have referred before to this Extinction Fiction paper by Donna Laframboise which puts the whole pile of pessimist agitsprop into perspective. Mr Black, as usual, ignores material like this and is only concerned to present the negative, world-will-end, must-tax-us-more synthesis; it’s not balanced reporting, just propaganda.

One of the new causes that the BBC is fervently supporting is the mantra that prisons don’t work. During the Labour years, the corporation was virtually silent on this issue, mainly because Blair, Straw, Brown and their lackeys clearly diasagreed.

But now that the Cleggerons seem hell bent on reducing the prison population sharply, our nice BBC reporter friends are on a full-scale hunt for every snippet that will support their case. Today it’s a platform for those perennial do-gooders the Howard league for penal reform to trumpet that only 6% of prison governors believe that short prison sentences work in helping to rehabilitate prisoners. Well hang on. Short prison sentences are not, and have never been intended to rehabilitate as a primary purpose. They’re there to send the message that in a civilised society, certain anti-social, irresponsible behaviour leads to a loss of liberty and all the inconveniences that go with it. It’s also a way of protecting the public and of spreading the reassuring message that if you do bad things, bad things happen to you.

The survey question was as inane as asking whether hanging would help in rehabiliating someone. I note that in the article that there is not a peep from anyone who supports jail as a deterrent or from those (like me) who are deeply uneasy about further ill-considered liberal experimentation in this complex area. Of course, we would all like more effective ways of rehabilitating people, but there is no sign that anything like this is being offered; the alternative to jail seems to be to not jail them – because it saves money – and/or give offenders community sentences (which are so circumscribed by human rights restrictions as to be a useless joke). Note also the careful selection of a quote from a supposed university expert saying that we should “address the needs of offenders”. Right on. Exactly the BBC mentality. But what about the victims of crime? And public safety?

Neil Midgley reports optimistically in the Daily Telegraph today that the BBC’s new editorial guidelines will force our greenie friends at the corporation to start including more so-called sceptics in their climate alarmist reporting, because for the first time, science is included in rules about impartiality.

My advice is not to hold your breath. I have a letter from Ceri Thomas, editor of Today, saying that because there is a ‘consensus’ about global warming, reporting of the subject only needs to give “due impartiality” to sceptics. In other words, sceptics are wrong, the consensus is right, and programmes should only pay minimal lip-service to them.

Nothing that I can see in the new guidlines changes this. Mr Thomas is pretty much representative of the entire BBC management class, and he sits on the board of a warmist organisation that camapaigns to give the warmist cause more prominence, and excludes sceptics.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of pounds of our money are being wasted in distributing 12,500 of these useless new guideline documents to BBC staff in Britain “and round the world”. What wonderful self-love!

The BBC’s news editors probably danced in glee when they decided to run with this story: a bunch of MEPs demanding more action on biodiversity. Two of their favourite causes – worship of the EU and eco-nuttery – combined in one! The ludicrousness of the EU’s latest demand for yet more power to combat yet another imaginary set of problems, is, of course, totally lost on them. Breathlessly, the feature reports that these over-paid, mainly useless MEPs include in their aims:

…eliminating subsidies harmful to biodiversity; zero net deforestation; the end of destructive fishing practices; and preventing the extinction of known threatened species.

That will be the EU that (for starters) is forcing the spending of trillions of our cash on needless climate change measures, a fraction of which – if used instead to promote sustainable business enterprise – could end help poverty in Africa; the same EU that is so incompetent and corrupt in handling money that its own accounts have not been signed off by accountants for 15 years; it will be the same EU that, throught the madness that is the CAP, forces the adoption of monocultural and rigid farming practices that are the enemy of wildlife; and the same EU that like common gangsters have bought up and plundered fishing rights off the coast of Africa with zero regard for the needs of Africans.

Of course, the BBC would not dream of discussing issues like this. Instead, the story is an exercise in admiration for both the EU and its puffed-up politicians. It’s by a veteran BBC greenie camapigner Mark Kinver, whose love of the EU is second only to his save-the-world zealotry.