Fracking BBC

[Teddy Bear]

If a week ago, you would have asked me what 'Fracking' is, I would have guessed that it was a word used in mixed company to describe BBC output.

Here's what this site has to say about it, and it's real relevance to BBC bias.

Fracking BBC
29 09 2011

guest post by Rupert Wyndham -about the BBC World Service “On the Fracking Frontline“:

Amongst an infinity of others, this programme is just one more example of a policy of systemic bias within the BBC. It might be tempting to add ‘in relation to so-called environmental reportage’. Upon reflection, of course, that is not true. BBC partiality and prejudice is evident across the entire spectrum of its journalistic output. In fact, the notion that BBC ‘journalists’ should report in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of insinuating personal opinion is now as moribund as the Corporation’s founding father himself or, indeed, as the Corporation’s own notional Editorial Standards.

It is quite evident that news reporting/commentary is no longer a matter of providing dispassionate and, as far as possible, carefully verified, accounts of matters of current concern. Rather, BBC news coverage is effectively little different from any other form of ‘reality television’. ‘Journalists’, laughably so termed, are no longer content to provide principally facts for listeners/viewers to absorb and interpret for themselves. On the contrary, instead they consider it incumbent upon themselves to pontificate. They do so, moreover, often with an arrogant disregard for the basic courtesies of civilised exchange. Indeed, impertinent interruption of interviewees now constitutes a mark of supposed independent thought and a tough interrogatory style. Presentational techniques display a uniformity, which denote the hallmarks of institutional in-house training. With few exceptions – and they, by and large, from an older generation – exaggerated gesticulation and extravagant body language are deployed to convey an aura of authority for output that, in truth, is merely glib.

Radio has its own counterpart techniques for achieving the same objectives – frequently repeated interruption being especially favoured. The adoption of an endemic ‘corporate speak’ reinforces the perception of shallowness, not to mention of professional indolence. Of course, we now know that much of this froth amounts to little more than rehashes of press releases issued by leftist pressure groups and vested interests – such as organs of pseudo-environmentalism, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Worldwide Fund for Nature, The National Trust, by way of example.

This programme was no exception. Thus, with excruciating inevitability, we had trotted out for the millionth time the fashionable mot juste of the moment, ‘iconic’, in this case to describe Woodstock. What, pray, is ‘iconic’ about Woodstock? How, might one now go on to ask, did the BBC ever survive the preceding eight or nine decades with only rare and selective recourse to what has now been rendered a facile and hackneyed choice of adjective?

But, though irritating, this type of derivative, copycat reporting is but a symptom of a far deeper and more insidious underlying malaise marked, in particular, by a wilful rejection of objectivity. Repudiation in favour of what? Why, to be sure, in favour of ‘emotional truth’, to borrow the specious and fatuous terminology offered by editors of The Times Comprehensive World Atlas. In short, mere assertion is no longer to be challenged. Demonstrable evidence of a contra-indicative character is to be simply ignored or wilfully misrepresented. Data are to be cynically manipulated within computers programmed to deliver predetermined outcomes. Such outcomes are to be so ordered that any and all observable phenomena in the real world are to be construed as confirmation of a contrived and perverted orthodoxy. Indeed, computer modelling is always to trump actual observation. And it is to this garbage that the BBC lends the weight of its authority – paid for, of course, by the license fee payer. Truth is to be the preserve of a consensus.

So it is with this programme. So-called ‘climate change’ attributable to CO2, human generated in particular, was not to be treated as an unproven assertion but as established fact, to be marshalled to inform programme content with as much certainty as blood circulation informs medical diagnosis. That scientific practitioners in thousands, many of immense achievement and distinction, regard climate change science as a fraudulent contrivance is a fact simply to be ignored, as is the associated chicanery attendant upon it.

Underlying institutional prejudice was carefully re-inforced by repeated references to ‘carbon’, notwithstanding its questionable contextual relevance. The shameless appeal to ‘emotional truth’ was also carefully structured in such a way as to create a putative link between emissions of CO2 (in the programme maker’s eyes, a pollutant) with other wholly unrelated – and, for a change, possibly even genuine instances of pollution as, for example, in China and Hungary. It is noteable that One Planet made (and, one suspects, makes) little of massive pollution created in China, but brought about solely as a consequence of shrill Western pseudo-environmentalist demand of battery operated vehicles. But then, of course, the welfare of third world citizens and their living environments are to be regarded as expendable on the altar of AGW religiosity.

Like most BBC science/eco coverage, this programme was/is meretricious and hypocritical.

To confirm this bias for yourself on this issue, here's a One Planet edition from BBC Radio on Fracking, which you can listen again to, in which they claim

One Planet - On The Fracking Frontline

This week a company in Britain announced it had found vast reserves of shale gas under the ground - and wants to extract it. But protesters are already gathering close to the site. It's the latest battle between energy companies and environmentalists over fracking - a process for extracting gas using high pressurised water mixed with sand and chemicals. The technic has been around for years, but attempts to expand operations around the world are proving hugely controversial.

In July, France opted to ban the process completely, and in Australia an energy company executive has been sipping fracking fluid in an attempt to prove its safety. Some of the fiercest battles over fracking can be found in the north east of America - where vast underground reserves could meet the country's entire gas needs for a decade - but fears over pollution to the water supplies are dividing communities. This week on One Planet, Matt Wells takes a drive through upstate New York to hear from both sides of the battle.

Also in the show, Mike waits for a surprise visitor to teach him about being kinder to the environment, and the boss of Hitachi Europe - Sir Stephen Gomersall - sits down to discuss why business must pick up the baton following the failure of the global community to strike a deal over climate change.

Listen to it, and see how balanced you find it.

[Teddy Bear]

An excellent article from James Delingpole at the Telegraph on how the BBC is doing its best to negate the value of utilising shale gas to ease our energy supply.

Why does the BBC so hate Britain?
By James Delingpole
Politics Last updated: November 3rd, 2011

"....And now our environment correspondent brings more news of the evils of shale gas"
Tomorrow sees my annual ordeal at the hands of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions. Groan.

My gripe is nothing personal: I like and respect Jonathan Dimbleby. Indeed, in the Spectator recently I singled him out as one of the very few liberal-lefties (the others were Stephen Fry and Frank Field) with sufficient inner decency not to become one of those who'll eagerly wheel out the electrodes for use on people like me come the imminent Red/Green revolution.
But the fact remains that Dimbleby is part of a propaganda machine so relentlessly deleterious to Britain's interests you rather wonder why it doesn't go the whole hog and begin each broadcast with the words "Gairmany Calling!"

Obviously there are any number of examples I could give of its treachery, starting with its decades worth of cheerleading for the EU Socialist Superstate. But the one that grated most recently was its reporting yesterday of the Shale Gas "Earthquake" non-story.
This report from its website gives you an idea of how the BBC covered the issue, both on its website and also on its radio news broadcasts. Note that fully one third of the article comprises quotes like this:

A spokesman for Frack Off said: "This report does not inspire confidence, they should have done their research before drilling began."
He added: "Can we believe anything else the industry says when it talks about the safety of fracking?"

and this:

Friends of the Earth's senior climate campaigner Tony Bosworth said: "This report shows fracking for shale gas caused earth tremors in Lancashire – experience in the US shows it could also pollute air and water supplies.
"Extracting shale gas would suck vital funding away from clean and safe energy alternatives that could create thousands more UK jobs.

and this:

Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, added: "Anyone who believes shale gas is the solution to our energy needs is being hopelessly naive.
"There are significant unknowns about the local and global impacts of fracking, illustrated by the conclusion by seismologists that recent fracking in the North West was responsible for a minor earthquake."
He said fracking was a "distraction from the real challenges" and that "real energy solutions" would be found in using renewable sources.

and this:

Nick Molho, head of energy policy at World Wildlife Fund UK, reiterated a call for a moratorium on fracking in the UK.
"These findings are worrying, and are likely to add to the very real concerns that people have about fracking and shale gas," he said.
Blimey. Just how many quotes from democratically unaccountable, professionally parti-pris, hard-left environmental activists making the same tendentious point does a BBC article need, you wonder, before it's deemed sufficiently on-message to correct the foolish masses' false consciousness?

It's not just the BBC that plays this game, of course. The Guardian's Damian Carrington has been at it too with a "the newfangled motor car will NEVER be a match for the horse-drawn carriage"-style article called "Shale gas is no game changer." And it goes without saying that Channel 4 news – as you'd expect with Jon Snow setting the tone – went even lower than anybody with a horribly dishonest report which even managed to wheel out the roundly discredited scene from Gasland where they light methane from a tap.

But doesn't our mainstream media have a duty to report small earthquakes in Blackpool, not many dead? Well, maybe, but as I've just shown above, it's how that reporting is framed which is what really counts.

Would it, for example, have been too rampantly-capitalist-and-in-the-pay-of-Big-Shale of the BBC to make the point Benny Peiser did at a recent unconventional gas summit?

“We have to put shale in the context of other energy sources in order to convey a comparative analysis of the environmental impact,” explained Peiser. “People forget the environmental costs of coal mining or oil exploration; nuclear also has its own risks.”

Renewable forms of energy also had an impact, he pointed out, like the pollution by solar panel manufacturers in China or what windmills do to a landscape and to birds.

Would it really have been dangerously, eye-poppingly, almost Delingpolely right-wing to note the extraordinarily beneficial effect the "Shale Gas Miracle" has had on US energy prices, as Matt Ridley did in the Spectator here:

The impact of shale gas in America is already huge. Gas prices have decoupled from oil prices and are half what they are in Europe. Chemical companies, which use gas as a feedstock, are rushing back from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities are converting their bus fleets to gas. Coal projects are being shelved; nuclear ones abandoned.

Rural Pennsylvania is being transformed by the royalties that shale gas pays (Lancashire take note). Drive around the hills near Pittsburgh and you see new fences, repainted barns and – in the local towns – thriving car dealerships and upmarket shops. The one thing you barely see is gas rigs. The one I visited was hidden in a hollow in the woods, invisible till I came round the last corner where a flock of wild turkeys was crossing the road. Drilling rigs are on site for about five weeks, fracking trucks a few weeks after that, and when they are gone all that is left is a “Christmas tree” wellhead and a few small storage tanks.

or to reiterate the sensible point he makes here, on the nonsense of most the charges laid against shale gas by an unlikely alliance of Monbiots and sinister Russian conventional gas interests:

Little wonder a furious attempt to blacken shale gas’s reputation is under way, driven by an unlikely alliance of big green, big coal, big nuclear and Gazprom. The environmental objections to shale gas are almost comically fabricated or exaggerated. Hydraulic fracturing or fracking uses 99.86% water and sand, the rest being a dilute solution of a few chemicals of the kind you find beneath your kitchen sink.

State regulators in Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming have all asserted in writing that there have been no verified or documented cases of groundwater contamination as a result of hydraulic fracking. Those flaming taps in the film “Gasland” were literally nothing to do with shale gas drilling and the film maker knew it before he wrote the script. The claim that gas production generates more greenhouse gases than coal is based on mistaken assumptions about gas leakage rates and cherry-picked time horizons for computing greenhouse impact.

It's long since time that the BBC was forced to recognise its responsibilities as our compulsory, near-monopoly broadcaster. If the only people who funded it were tofu-eating metropolitan anti-capitalist bien-pensants who all believed in renewable energy with the same blind ideological fervour as Chris Huhne then the BBC would be perfectly within its rights to broadcast this Spartist drivel. But they're not. The BBC's job is also to represent – or try to represent – the interests of people who are shocked by rising energy bills, who are desperately worried about Britain's economic future, who might benefit from a job working in or servicing the shale gas industry, who innocently believe (in their sweet but oh-so-naive way) that the British Broadcasting Corporation's true purpose is to broadcast for Britain.

Add all these people together and you'll likely find that they outnumber the membership of Frack Off, Damian Carrington, George Monbiot, Caroline Lucas, Chris Huhne and the various spokesmen for the WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth by an order of magnitude rather greater than the minuscule, barely noticeable tremor that lightly stirred Lancashire during the summer.