Bishop Hill Biased BBC on Joe Smith
Dec 3, 2012 BBC Biased BBC takes a look at the BBC's relationship with green lobbyists and notices the similarities between the IBT's submission to the Jones Review of BBC Science coverage and Joe Smith's 2005 paper on environmental coverage.
It’s a funny thing but having read Dr Joe Smith’s 2005 presentation and then read the IBT 2010 submission it is apparent that they are almost identical…not word for word….but idea for idea, philosophy for philosophy and demand for demand in the way that they would like the BBC to report climate science.
There are at least 10 major points of similarity that stand out…..the conclusion I have come to is that either Joe Smith, or possibly Harrabin, wrote this submission for the IBT or someone at the IBT has taken Smith’s work almost verbatim, and submitted it to the BBC.
I would suggest that Smith wrote it…it is practically the CMEP ‘syllabus’….and Smith has a track record in working unacknowledged ‘behind the scenes’ on BBC projects and programmes that promote the idea of man-made climate change.
Read the whole thing. (Link fixed)
Reader Comments (15)
The link does not work for me.
The link does not work for me.
Here's a link that should work:
http://biased-bbc.com/2012/12/carbon-footprints-and-dr-joe-smiths-fingerprints.html
Just turned up to put a link to it on Unthreaded myself only to find this post already in place. It is a very welcome addition to the analysis of just how supine the BBC has been in the face of eco-activist pressure. They are not alone in that - the three major political parties in the UK have also caved in without a fight, as has the SNP in Scotland big-time, and have gone into an intellectual penumbra of conformist uniformity that has spread over the political class - the candle being held by UKIP currently providing the best source of illumination there. May it turn into a lighthouse!
It's a bit off topic but in view of the recent snow I thought it was time for another good belly laugh at this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
I still laugh every time I read it!
Mr Shade:
I don't it fair to call the BBC and the major political parties 'supine . . . in the face of eco-activist pressure'. Nor, I think, can you claim that they have 'caved in' to such pressure. On the contrary, they have actively, enthusiastically and eagerly embraced and trumpeted it. No persuasion was ever needed. And of course, a handful of tiny exceptions aside, nor has there been any recantation.
@John Shade Dec 3, 2012 at 11:03 AM
Some politicians have supported the CAGW hypothesis from its early days, in particular many in the Labour party and several prominent Conservatives. A few may have actually believed the science, others believed it provided an excuse to pile on more taxes (on CO2) and yet others sought to justify it all by the need to diversify energy sources in the face of a decline in N Sea oil and gas output. Lord Lawson has said that Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, wanted a reason to promote nuclear power. The election of Blair in 1997 put political rocket boosters behind the CAGW idea, resulting in enthusiastic support for the Kyoto treaty and the hiring of activists into the government to write the early draft of the Climate Change Bill (as recounted by the Baroness Worthington, who was ennobled for her work on it).
Futerra`s The Rules of the Game, (October 2005), part funded by three government departments, advised that sceptics should be ignored - "iiritating but unimportant". In August 2006 the IPPR commissioned an organisation called Linguistic Landscapes to produce Warm Words, "part of its project on how to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK". The report advised:
"To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken."
The BBC has been an active, and apparently willing, participant in this sustained PR programme since the January 2006 seminar it does not want to talk about. Biased BBC is to be congratulated on its detective work. No doubt other examples will be revealed over time.
Those promoting the CAGW agenda have been remarkably successful - buttressed as they are by the Climate Change Act, the institutions and quangos that resulted from it (eg the Climate Change Committee), the dispensation of £millions of taxpayers money to spread the word and control research grants and of course control of the primary national media source, the BBC. No wonder Miliband wants to control the press too. I am reminded of the words of Dr Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Slightly O/T but on 29th November 2012, Lord (Scouse) Oxburgh was interviewed by John Humphries about the government's energy policy. Mr. Humphries topped and tailed the interview by telling us that Lord Oxburgh was a former chairman of Shell, but failed to mention Oxburgh's widespread activities in renewable energy. In his usual shameless way Oxburgh went on to urge "investement" into CCS and renewables, while all of those listening were kept, by the BBC, unaware that he, Scouse Oxburgh, stands to make a substantial fortune out of public "investment" (which, to the government, actually means giving money to people with no requirement on their part to deliver anything.
I have written to Radio 4 to seek an explanation. This is just the sort of shoddy journalism that got them into trouble on Newsnight, except in this case they are deliberately misleading the public. I say deliberately because it cannot surely be a mistake for a journalist of Humphries not to do a background check on his interviewee. Surely?
"Citizen Smith"
The reason for this is that the vast majority of those who paid any attention at the time thought that common sense would prevail.
And by "common sense" I do not necessarily mean that AGW was a load of nonsense or a conspiracy or anything else of that sort. It just did not occur for quite a while that this particular scare (if that was what it turned out to be) was going to be adopted wholeheartedly by the eco-lunatic fringe in cahoots with Delingpole's "watermelons", the global government freaks and the neo-Malthusians.
Not for the first time we have discovered that lies (in the form of political spin and shamelessly distorted PR) are halfway round the world before truth (in the form of rational debate) got its boots on.
Neither did we expect that (allegedly) honest statisticians, economists, politicians, and others that we rely on (as laymen) to tell us the truth because they have knowledge that we lack were going to manipulate the facts in such a way as to produce an outcome that happened to suit their agenda rather than the well-being of the public that they have a duty to serve.
Rog Tallbloke points out in the foot comments of the Biased BBC blog article that Joe Smith did write the IBT's submission. Its still there listed in Smith's Open University bio profile under 'Other works' as
Smith J. (2011) IBT submission to the BBC Trust Review of Impartiality in Science Coverage (submitted without name credit)
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/people-profile.php?name=Joe_Smith
I don't seem able to access any Biased BBC pages - anyone else still having this problem?
I have the same problem since yesterday, cannot access their website
I cant access the Biased BBC website either. It's been one of my linked "favourite places" for ages, now it's gone.
The Biased BBC forum said a couple of days ago that they thought it was just temporary and would soon be fixed - but it isn't yet, as far as I can see.