BBC on Its Climate Bias: 'Move Along. Nothing to See Here.'

The BBC has reaffirmed its commitment to green bias in a new report which promises to make it harder than ever for climate sceptics to get a fair hearing on any of its channels.

According to the interim report, produced by the organisation’s oxymoronically-named overseer the BBC Trust, as many as 200 senior BBC staff have been encouraged to attend seminars where they are told what to think on climate change by “experts”.

These experts, inevitably, are heavily biased towards the man-made global warming scare narrative. One of those named is Michael Jacobs, Visiting Professor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, an arch climate alarmist who formerly advised Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

“We believe the seminars have played an important role in improving the quality of our coverage,” boasts the report.

But this statement is only true if your definition of “quality” embraces bias, groupthink, the abandonment of journalistic standards and the rejection of the scientific method.

For example, the report notes that:

There was an in depth briefing for key editors and correspondents organised by the College of Journalism ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change, which was published in September.

This consisted of a briefing from senior members of the IPCC, a panel discussion involving three climate change scientists representing a range of views and an internal discussion about the editorial implications for our output. We think this made a substantial contribution to balanced and proportionate coverage of the IPCC report.

In what way, exactly, are “senior members of the IPCC” likely to give a “balanced” perspective on the report they themselves wrote and on which their reputations depend?

As has long been evident to those outside the BBC bubble, the IPCC is a heavily-politicised organisation with a strong vested interest in promoting an alarmist narrative and a lengthening track record of failed predictions and deeply suspect claims.

Yet the BBC cannot see this – let alone report on the issue fairly and accurately – because it is so blinded by green ideology. Its chief environment analyst Roger Harrabin, for example, is a green activist who co-organised a notorious seminar in which “the best scientific experts” told senior BBC staff what the correct view was on climate change.

The BBC spent many tens of thousands of pounds hiring lawyers and fighting FOI requests in order to keep the identity of these “experts” secret. But an enterprising blogger Maurizio Morabito unearthed the information nonetheless. It turned out that most of them were green activists from pressure groups like Greenpeace and Stop Climate Chaos.

However, rather than admit the extent of the problem, the BBC commissioned a whitewash from a sympathetic alarmist called Steve Jones. Jones, a left-leaning geneticist whose speciality is snails, had no particular expertise or knowledge about the climate change debate – as he went on to demonstrate in a shoddy, ill-researched, intellectually dishonest, but delightfully well-paid report for the BBC Trust.

In it he suggested that climate “denialism” belongs in the same category as the belief that ‘AIDS has nothing to do with viruses, the MMR vaccine is unsafe, complex organs could never evolve, or even that the 9/11 disaster was a US government plot.’

Jones also claimed that the evidence for “global warming” is so “overwhelming” that the BBC would be quite wrong to imply that it was a two-sided debate by giving “deniers” airtime.

Earlier this year, evidence emerged that at least some of the BBC’s editors were heeding this advice. David Rose in the Mail On Sunday found an email which Alasdair MacLeod, head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, had sent to 18 senior producers and editors.

It read: “When covering climate change stories, we should not run debates/discussions directly between scientists and sceptics. If a programme does run such a discussion, it will…be in breach of the editorial guidelines on impartiality.”

So, according to this new definition, “impartiality” means privileging a narrow range of viewpoints and shutting out all those with which you disagree. R-i-g-h-t.