Why do distorted views on global warming and the Middle East go unchallenged by the BBC?
By Paul Homewood
Booker highlights the latest examples of BBC bias:
Anyone who thinks that the BBC any longer pays the slightest attention to its statutory obligation to report only with “accuracy and impartiality” should have heard two items on last Tuesday’s Today programme on Radio 4, each so one-sidedly propagandist that they made a complete mockery of the BBC Charter.
It was inevitable in light of the recent heatwaves that the BBC would rush to publicise the “Hothouse Earth” report, in which a group of global warming zealots claimed that world temperatures are now on the verge of sending the climate spiralling out of control. Unless we comply with the 2015 Paris climate accords (or possibly even if we do), and allow an environmentalist world government to bring about a “total re-orientation” of human behaviour, apocalypse is likely.
First interviewed was one of the report’s authors, who made the astonishing claim, completely unchallenged, that, thanks to our burning of fossil fuels, we are now seeing “the highest temperatures on Earth since the last ice age”. It has long been established by proper science that in the Holocene Optimum, which followed the end of that last glaciation 12,000 years ago, parts of the Earth, for three millennia, were often far hotter than they are today.
But next we only had a senior official of the UN body which organised the Paris conference to echo this message in spades. What, of course, we never hear from the BBC is that the Paris accord was no more than empty wishful thinking. The latest official figures from China show that, as already the world’s greatest CO2 emitter, it is still building ever more coal-fired power stations – exactly as most non-Western countries indicated was their intention just before Paris. Even the accord conceded that CO2 levels would continue to rise after 2015 to 40 percent above their 2005 level.
The Today programme followed this with an even more shamelessly one-sided item on President Trump’s latest sanctions on Iran. With the aid of a senior US official who, under President Obama, was one of the negotiators of that bogus nuclear deal with Iran, and a professor of American studies at Tehran University, who blamed all the problems of the Middle East on America and Israel, this was so overtly pro-Iranian and anti-American that I hope next week to mention the key facts the BBC left out, including the latest wave of anti-government protests across Iran itself. On these and so many other issues, the BBC now has such a clear “party line” that it no longer makes any pretence of trying to report accurately or impartially. Alas, there now seems no way it can be called to account for giving its audience such a distorted view of the world.
BBC bias has long been an issue on many matters, but they now cannot even be bothered to hide it.
Their party line line on Trump, is that he must be wrong.
As for climate change, they hide behind the “settled science” mantra, which gives them cover to promulgate all sorts of lies and misinformation. Anybody who dares to challenge it, even mainstream scientists, must by definition be a denier who should not be given airtime.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The BBC is against Brexit, Trump, Ukip, capitalism, fracking, populism, free speech and good old commonsense, with zero pretense of honesty on these subjects. It is for socialism, world Government, PCness and shutting down debate on all other topics.
If Treason May was a true Conservative and not a socialist who, along with many others, infiltrated the Conservative Party, she would have shut the BBC down years ago.
We need Boris to get rid of her, but would he do anything about the biased BBC?. https://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/08/12/boris-vs-the-burqa-the-brexit-battle-begins/
My kids don’t watch the BBC – not because of me – but because there’s so many other forms of entertainment like games or social media.
When that generation get their own homes and the demand to “pay the fee to watch the BBC” – they will think “WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS? – why am I paying for something I don;t use”
I don’t have any data on this, but my anecdotal experience is that single men rarely have a TV Licence or watch TV; there is just very little on that appeals to men.
A significant percentage of viewers of Eastenders are men (from memory 18%), but within a couple of months of separation they’ve stopped watching.
The lack of male interest in TV is one of the reasons the BBC has been trying to move the Licence (which is a tax according to the OECD) into an orthodox tax on all households.
What is “male interest”?
What is ‘male interest’?. Not cookery programs, homes in the country, twee costume dramas, soaps, dancing programs, bitchy talent programs, reality TV, programs that endlessly prove that women are equal to men but better and all that jazz. What brings in male viewers are mainline sports, science, exploration, crime dramas where the men are not all idiots, and so on.
I hope that helped. Personally I like costume dramas, but most don’t. Except of course when they retreat into the dreaded ‘soaps in long dresses’ format.
Thanks,
I would agree with most of your examples, but as a male, I am not particularly interested in sport (not sports), and I would like to see more opera and good comedy, although I am not sure where they lie on the gender spectrum.
I think there has been too much “celebrity gossip” and dance (Strictly) but I never watch those. I can’t understand why anyone, male or female, wastes a second watching soaps.
Of course you can’t please everyone and if there was more stuff that I liked on TV I would spend too much time watching it anyway.
I don’t mind paying out for the licence to watch the stuff I like.
The best place for a clown is at a circus not as our Prime Minister. Even the Tory members aren’t that daft as to make it happen.
But Gerry, they already did.
If accuracy and impartiality is statutory they should be prosecuted. Add Corbyn to your list because they clearly use distorted camera work to make the huge crowds he attracts seem much smaller than they actually are. The same thing applies to female sport events where they bend over backwards not to show the empty stadia.
I despise the SNP in Scotland – but it was blatantly obvious they were using similar tricks against the SNP. They’ve long used the same tricks against industry and commerce. The laughable thing is if anyone still thinks they’re unbiased.
I’ve noticed on the website that they mix the sport up more so that it is confusing when reading a headline to then find out they meant women’s sport. Ironically, the BBC should be covering minority interests such as women’s sport – which even women don’t go and watch – as they are not a commercial operation and so do not need to chase audience. The same with radio stations – the mainstream ones are mirrored by private ones so can be dispensed with.
No doubt part of the reason the BBC feel they can do this is that they’re getting less complaints – and the reason is because so many people (like me) are just not watching or listening to the BBC any longer.
And indeed, the more the BBC feel they can be biased, the more obvious it is to any sane person they are biased and the more people leave them in droves to find their news from more impartial sources (like anyone).
Once this starts – as it has – it is a vicious cycle for the BBC (virtuous for us) and only a matter of time before the numerous alternative outlets like “the rebel”, begin to take large numbers away from the BBC and it begins to be a majority of people who see absolutely no relevance paying for political nonsense and non-science we get from the BBC demand that we stop paying for them.
The BBC will eventually be privatised – and the more biased it becomes the quicker it heads toward privatisation.
Personally I don’t mind paying my licence fee for the BBC.
But, it should be on the basis that it return to unbiased, intelligent broadcaster, that it was before.
Until it does the fee should be reduced by 10% a year for 5 years, and let it “cut its coat to match its cloth”. and stop pandering to the masses.
Even without the bias and propaganda, there can be no justification for a compulsory telly tax in a world of video-on-demand, Netflix, Amazon, youtube and a thousand independent online news oulets. Let people pay for what they watch. The BBC should become a privately owned left-wing media outlet – same as all the rest – and drop the pretence of being impartial.
Great idea, but I’m not sure the BBC do represent a concrete ‘leftist’ political position; more the narrow cultural and political views of an isolated, self anointed ‘elite’ in the UK, which includes all the main political parties and their dependents. They’ll always leave the BBC where it is as it feeds their ego and reflects how they see the world and themselves.
There may be a link between the decline in BBC audience figures and the attempt to restrict the so-called “fake news” of social media. We were heading towards 1984-style BBC telescreens on every wall (we have always been at war with Climate Change), but the internet is killing that route to mind control, hence the current battle to censor it.
I admire Booker for plugging away at the DT despite them shunting his column to the backwaters and cutting his space because he doesn’t subscribe to their Insanity Brexit and points out all the flaws in their stance with accurate researched information.
I was talking to someone the other day whose views embodied the narrow, identity driven ‘intersectional’ politics ascendant in the media and among members of younger generations with a deficit in critical thinking. I always think ‘each to their own’, but it raised my eyebrows when she talked about a music event she was organising where she wanted to make sure ‘the right kind of people’ attended.
I’m hardly old and not remotely right-leaning, but it strikes me the BBC now have a very clear view of what constitutes ‘the right kind of people’ (themselves, bleating metropolitan dinner-party ‘socialists’, bored neurotic middle class mums and the younger generations they are so desperate to relate to in order to feel hip again), and ‘the wrong kind of people’ (anyone else possessing a brain). I’m proud to be the latter, and glad my license fee is up for renewal next month as I’ll be cutting the cable. For anyone else thinking of doing this, there are now so many cheap ‘on demand’ options that unless you enjoy the feeling of being endlessly nagged by a bunch of pious teenagers, you’d be unlikely to miss anything important, and you’ll save a bit of money.
This yankee finds it very interesting that after exiting the Paris climate treaty, the US leads in declining CO2 emissions, while the signatories appear to be adding CO2 at ever faster rates.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/co2-emissions.html
The BBC’s climate bias springs from Horrorbin’s conspiratorial meeting between greenies and high level been executives back in 2009 ( Read Andrew Montford ‘The Propaganda Bureau’) which censored sceptics from the airwaves. But poll after pollsters here and in the USA show that the public could not care a toss about climate change so the web is not only biased- it’s boring,
Okay you and Brooker say the science actually doesn’t prove that there is global warming, man made or otherwise. So why do so many people, scientists included, believe in global warming? Who gains from promulgating the myth? I just don’t understand and would appreciate your opinions/facts regarding the matter. I agree with your stance but my son and daughter think I’m being stupid.Warmest regardsRory Green
Nobody denies that it is not warmer now than in the 19thC (which scientists say was the coldest period since the ice age).
But that is only the first part of the debate.
Is all the warming AGW?
Is there any evidence that warming will continue, or be as much as predicted or as dangerous?
Is the warmer climate we have now actually beneficial?
Are extreme weather events getting worse, or the reverse?
Is every storm, flood, drought heatwave due, or at least worsened, by climate change?
Has it been warmer in the past?
Will Paris have any effect at all?
What will be the cost of decarbonisation?
These questions and many more are shut down by the warmist establishment and the BBC.
I don’t know exactly what Brooker thinks, but nowhere in the article does it say that he “doesn’t believe there is global warming”. What the article implies is that he doesn’t believe that “world temperatures are now on the verge of sending the climate spiralling out of control.”. Even the scientists being interviewed on BBC said it was very unlikely and at the extreme end of predictions, but you could’t tell that from the BBC reporting.
Another high summer passes and we fail to attain a highest evah afternoon temperature yet again.
For us to be getting hotter the temperature must overtake the previous high – everything else is sophistry.
Wake me up when it happens. I confess that I am bored with reading about ice that hasn’t vanished and grown men arguing over tenths of a degree Fahrenheit centigrade and Kelvin.
The hothouse earth report and others like it appeal to a readership obsessed with the the end of civilization. My guess is that this fear instinct derives from a genetic memory of the Late Bronze Age Collapse when civilization HAD ended.
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/climate-change-late-bronze-age-collapse/
My theory is that droppings from the horses used for powering the chariots of the rich:
– (1) gave off copious methane, which,
– (2) caused global warming, which,
– (3) was amplified by feed-back, and,
– (4) caused catastrophes of extreme weather.
Naturally, therefore, we have a race-memory of horse-shit, and we fear it (together with a similar fear of bull-shit – due to confusion between these two similar animals). These matters are the key to Mythology.