By Paul Homewood
A double whammy for the BBC from Booker today:
How ironic it was last week to hear the BBC leading its news on that Commons report claiming that our "democracy is being destroyed" by the flood of "fake news" spread by social media. In fact, thanks to the relentless bias of its own coverage of so many issues, there is no more influential source of "fake news" than the BBC itself. Here are two glaring, but far from untypical, recent examples.
The first began earlier in February with puffs on the BBC News website and Radio 4's Today programme by Roger Harrabin, the BBC's "environment analyst", for a report by a body called the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), warning of "multiple crises" that threaten to "destabilise" the world's entire environmental system. Particularly striking was a repeated claim that, since 2005, thanks to climate change, there has been a 15-fold increase in floods across the world and a 20-fold increase in "extreme temperature events".
This seemed so startling that it prompted Paul Homewood, the diligent statistical analyst, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog to track down the evidence for these claims. It turned out that they originated from a database of natural disasters, EM-DAT. According to Homewood, this showed that the chief reason for these rocketing increases was a very significant change in the way such "disasters" were being recorded, to include thousands of more recent events that would previously have been far too small to register in the global figures (the IPPR itself warned that these figures should, therefore, be treated with "caution").
But then Homewood found that the IPPR version was taken from something cited as the "GMO White Paper", which might have sounded scientific. In fact, the "GMO" stands for Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo, the asset management firm run by Jeremy Grantham, who also funds the Grantham Institute on Climate Change at two London universities, Imperial College and the LSE (similar figures have been quoted by Lord Stern, the chair of the LSE branch).
Even the BBC realised that it had come rather a cropper on these claims. Subsequently, it allowed for at least a partial correction, aided by Mark Lynas, the climate campaigner, and the authors of that disaster database to which Grantham attributed his figures. But the impact of this was infinitely less than that of the coverage by Harrabin.
It was he who, back in 2006, was the organiser of that "secret seminar" between top BBC executives and green activists, which led to the BBC policy that – despite its statutory obligation to report only with "impartiality" – because the science on climate change was now settled, there was no need to give "equal space" to views that questioned it (with results so much in evidence ever since).
For a second, quite different, example, there could be no better measure of how far the once revered BBC World Service has degenerated than its bizarre recent celebration of the 40th anniversary of the seizure of power in Iran by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Its centrepiece has been a still continuing multi-episode "dramatisation", Fall of the Shah, portraying the Ayatollah being welcomed by cheering crowds as the liberator of his country from the corrupt and tyrannical Shah.
Other programmes focused on the "successes" of Iran's Islamic revolution: better education of women and recovery of national self-respect, with the main aim of its foreign policy being to promote "stability" across the Middle East. If Iran has grievous economic problems arousing mass popular protests, these programmes suggested, they are mainly caused by President Trump's reimposition of sanctions.
One could scarcely have guessed from all this that Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime is one of the world's most ruthless dictatorships with, per capita, the highest number of executions, including public hangings; that much of its economy is corruptly controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), its equivalent of the old Soviet KGB; that most of the $100 billion (£76.5 billion) in Iranian assets unfrozen by the West under that dubious nuclear deal was seized by the IRGC to finance its propping up of the Assad regime in Syria and fomenting terror across the Middle East, from Yemen to Afghanistan; and that this in itself, rather than using the money to boost Iran's failing economy, has been a central message of those desperate recent mass protests.
Yet another dismal triumph for the BBC's very own "fake news" machine.
The frustrating thing is that Booker could fill his column every week with similar examples of fake news from the BBC.
As for the BBC, this IPPR story exemplifies just how broken their coverage of climate change has become.
Harrabin may have not been competent enough to spot the absurdity of the IPPR claims, which he was happy to headline. But inviting the opinions of a wide range of experts would have quickly uncovered the error.
Instead all he did was quote two scientists, Simon Lewis and Harriet Bulkeley, who were so biased that they failed to even question the claims.
The Today programme followed up the story, and inevitably fell into the same trap, interviewing Joanna Haigh, the hopelessly biased Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College.
Unsurprisingly she fully backed up the flawed IPPR report, never deigning to mention that her own employer had been ultimately responsible for a grossly misleading report, which was then blown out of all proportion by her chums at the BBC.
If the BBC want to avoid broadcasting such patently obvious fake news in future, they really must be prepared to ask the opinions of a much wider section of opinion, and not just the narrow circle of prejudiced, well funded insiders, who are only prepared to give answers which suit their agenda.
For those who have not read it, my original report is here:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/bbc-repeat-fake-disaster-claims/
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader https://ift.tt/2EtAEpJ
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