Jeremy Paxman´s EU documentary

Veteran journalist Jeremy Paxman´s Brussels documentary is a solid piece of work. Watch it!

The BBC on new 20 country poll: "Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined"

Kudos to the BBC for bringing us the findings of the new GlobeScan poll, which confirms that years of mainstream media global warming propaganda has led to even greater skepticism among ordinary people:

Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined, according to a poll carried out in 20 countries.

Only four now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris.
In a similar poll before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, eight countries had majorities favouring tough action.
The poll has been provided to the BBC by research group GlobeScan.
Just under half of all those surveyed viewed climate change as a "very serious" problem this year, compared with 63% in 2009.

The findings will make sober reading for global political leaders, who will gather in Paris next week for the start of the United Nations climate conference, known as COP21.

New definition of the European Union

The Empire has no clothes

I don´t often quote the BBC, but now it is time to do it:

"In fact, many younger Europeans probably can't remember a time when the EU was anything other than a study in sustained crisis management."

Jamie Coomarasamy
Presenter, Newshour

The BBC is brainwashing its news staff to deny "climate deniers" access to airtime

A formerly venerable broadcasting organisation is wasting license payers' money on brainwashing its news staff to deny critics of global warming access to airtime:

Reporters for BBC News are being directed to significantly curb the amount of air time they give to people with anti-science viewpoints — including people who deny climate change exists — in order to improve the accuracy and fairness of the network’s news coverage, according to a report released by the BBC’s governing body on Thursday.
The BBC Trust’s report was designed to assess the network’s impartiality in science coverage, in other words, whether it is staying neutral on critical issues. In order to be neutral when covering science, however, the BBC noted it needs to avoid “false balance,” a fallacy that occurs when two sides of an argument are assumed to have equal value.

“Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given,” the report said.
The type of “false balance” news segment that the BBC is now actively trying to avoid is one that is fairly common in American network news’ climate change coverage. It involves putting one person who is well-versed on climate science next to a person who denies climate science, and having them debate.
Editorially, this type of debate makes the network look like it’s being balanced, giving equal opportunity to opposite viewpoints. However, because 95 to 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to warm, that balance is false, giving disproportionate time to a viewpoint that is widely rejected in the scientific community.
In order to have a truly balanced and statistically representative debate about climate change, television news networks would have to pit 97 climate scientists against three climate deniers. Because that likely wouldn’t work very well, the BBC is favoring an approach that instead severely limits the amount of air time climate deniers are given.
So far, the report said, approximately 200 staff members have attended seminars and workshops aimed at improving the balance of their science coverage.

Fortunately, more and more people have decided to "favour an approach" that severely limits the amount of time spent listening to or watching BBC programmes.

Why on earth is the BBC wasting money and resources on "the largest ever study of people's experience of climate change in seven countries"?

BBC Media Action (the new name for the BBC World Service Trust) has today launched, Climate Asia, "the largest ever study of people's experience of climate change in seven countries - Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam."

Ahead of the launch, senior research manager at Climate Asia, Sonia Whitehead has written a summary of the research project in the warmist Guardian, titled "The first rule of climate change research: don't mention climate change".

And what did the scores of BBC researchers find out, when they talked to 35,500 people in seven countries, without mentioning "climate change"?

Senior research manager Whitehead relates some core findings:

It was clear that people were noticing changes in weather and resources. They said things like, in Vietnam "I now don't need to wear a jumper until November", in India "I have to walk further to get water", and in Nepal "maize is not as fat as it used to be" and in China "goats are now grazing further up the mountain".

The Climate Asia website gives us some more fascinating "results" of this ground breaking research:

83%

of people feel changes in climate are affecting their ability to be healthy

 

40%

of people in the region feel the number of extreme weather events has increased over the last 10 years

 

46%

do not feel well informed about these issues

 

The purpose with the research is this, according to the information published in the Climate Asia portal:

 

This unique data provides information for governments, donors, the media, NGOs and everyone who wants to support people to adapt to the changing environment.

 

Even the BBC "researchers" themselves do not appear to be too convinced about the reliability of their research:

 

No Warranties
The Data is believed to be correct at the time of posting.  BBC Media Action cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the Data or any information on or provided in connection with the Site, or any other information accessed through this Site.  BBC Media Action and any of its officers, trustees, agents, employees, and sub-contractors, are not responsible for any errors or omissions or for results obtained from the use of this information and disclaims any representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranty of fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement, to the fullest extent permissible under any applicable laws.
BBC Media Action does not warrant that the functions contained at this Site will be uninterrupted or error free, that defects will be corrected, or that this Site or the server that makes it available are free of viruses or other harmful components.

 

The entire undertaking raises at least on basic question:

 

Why is the BBC wasting huge sums of money on this kind of empty and useless research, which is totally unrelated to its task of producing high quality programmes?

BBC uses former Kremlin adviser as main consultant for series on Putin´s Russia

The BBC offers Vladimir Putin a helping hand

The once great BBC again shows its true colours. The overall narrative in a new documentary series on Russia is slanted towards the country´s corrupted - and according to many observers criminal - dictator Vladimir Putin. No wonder, because the main consultant to the series, former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh, worked for three years from 2006 as an adviser to the Russian government:

Angus Roxburgh is well known to the British public as a former BBC Moscow correspondent. Much more relevant is the fact that Mr Roxburgh was a public relations consultant to the Kremlin for three years between 2006 and 2009. I have no doubt that he is a man of integrity, but it is profoundly shocking that the BBC should even have considered using him, given the nature of his previous employment.
Just imagine the outcry if the BBC were to employ President Ahmadinejad’s former spin consultant when making a film about Iran, or a former Tory central office type when making a film about David Cameron in a British election year.
So why is Roxburgh acceptable? I have been hearing very sad and alarming accounts about the BBC’s coverage of Putin’s Russia for over a decade. Those wanting to learn more can read an article written by the former BBC producer Masha Karp in Standpoint magazine in November 2010, which tells how her programme about the death of Alexander Litvinenko was suppressed by the World Service.
There are other such stories. As The Guardian correspondent Luke Harding records in his recent book, Mafia State, “the BBC Moscow bureau in particular is extremely reluctant to report on stories that might offend the Kremlin”.
The elections on March 4 are of huge importance. If he wins, Vladimir Putin can look forward to a further 12 years in power, making him the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin. Some good judges believe that this outcome might plunge Russia into a new dark age. How fortunate for Putin that he has a useful idiot in Jonathan Powell and a fearful news organisation like the BBC to make life easy for him.

Read the entire Telegraph article here

BBC - a propaganda machine for climate alarmists

For myself - and quite a lot of other observers - the sad truth has been quite obvious already for a number of years: When it comes to global warming (or "climate change") the BBC has lost all journalistic credibility by choosing to act as a propaganda machine for all the world´s climate alarmists. Now one of the BBC´s most respected (former) news anchors, Peter Sissons, gives us an insider´s view of what has been - and still is -going on in the Beeb:

For me, though, the most worrying aspect of political correctness was over the story that recurred with increasing frequency during my last ten years at the BBC — global warming (or ‘climate change’, as it became known when temperatures appeared to level off or fall slightly after 1998). 
From the beginning I was unhappy at how one-sided the BBC’s coverage of the issue was, and how much more complicated the climate system was than the over-simplified two-minute reports that were the stock-in-trade of the BBC’s environment correspondents. 
These, without exception, accepted the UN’s assurance that ‘the science is settled’ and that human emissions of carbon dioxide threatened the world with catastrophic climate change. Environmental pressure groups could be guaranteed that their press releases, usually beginning with the words ‘scientists say . . . ’ would get on air unchallenged.

On one occasion, an MP used BBC airtime to link climate change ­doubters with perverts and holocaust deniers, and his famous interviewer didn’t bat an eyelid.

On one occasion, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, the science correspondent of Newsnight actually informed viewers ‘scientists calculate that he has just four years to save the world’. What she didn’t tell viewers was that only one alarmist scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, had said that.

Sissons continues:

It’s the lack of simple curiosity about one of the great issues of our time that I find so puzzling about the BBC. When the topic first came to ­prominence, the first thing I did was trawl the internet to find out as much as possible about it. 
Anyone who does this with a mind not closed by religious fervour will find a mass of material by respectable scientists who question the orthodoxy. Admittedly, they are in the minority, but scepticism should be the natural instinct of scientists — and the default setting of journalists.
Yet the cream of the BBC’s inquisitors during my time there never laid a glove on those who repeated the ­mantra that ‘the science is settled’. On one occasion, an MP used BBC airtime to link climate change ­doubters with perverts and holocaust deniers, and his famous interviewer didn’t bat an eyelid.
Meanwhile, Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice-President and climate change campaigner, entertained the BBC’s editorial elite in his suite at the Dorchester and was given a free run to make his case to an admiring internal audience at Television Centre. 
His views were never subjected to journalistic scrutiny, even when a British High Court judge ruled that his film, An Inconvenient Truth, ­contained at least nine scientific errors, and that ministers must send new guidance to teachers before it was screened in schools. From the BBC’s standpoint, the judgment was the real inconvenience, and its ­environment correspondents downplayed its significance.

Read the entire Daily Mail story here.