BBC Accused of Climate Change Cover-Up

[Teddy Bear]

There are those are very aware of the particular bias by the BBC, that is mostly termed 'left-wing', yet deem it to be unconscious or unintentional.

A cover-up is evidence that the bias is conscious and intentional. That the corporation is aware that it has transgressed the rules of its charter, and is manipulating whatever it can to hide the fact, rather than alter its output to conform.

An example is the study of anti-Israel bias contained in the Balen report, which the BBC has spent do far a third of a million pounds on concealing the content from the public.

There is also the Savile abuse story, for which it appears the BBC has been guilty of covering up for over 40 years, and by then cancelling the Newsnight report about it, of trying to cover up the cover up.

The article below from The Commentator details an ongoing attempt by the BBC to cover up its participation in a Climate Change seminar 6 years ago.

BBC accused of "systematic bias" and climate change cover-up
The public-funded broadcaster appeared in court this week to defend its decision to conceal the names of "scientific experts" that attended a BBC climate change seminar in 2006

A six-year Freedom of Information battle between a North Wales pensioner and the BBC’s Director of news, Helen Boaden has revealed the lengths to which the BBC will go to to conceal information that is in the public interest.

The BBC is refusing to disclose the names of ‘scientific experts’ who attended a BBC formal seminar in 2006 titled – ‘Climate Change - the Change to Broadcasting’. In 2007, the BBC Trust, the public-funded broadcaster’s governor, published an 80 page report – 'From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel' which revealed some details as to the nature of the seminar.

The report hinted at the corporation’s tendency to institutional bias and the problem of editorial policy reflecting particular views and not those of the wider public.

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]”.

Curious as to whom the climate change experts may be, blogger Tony Newbery filed a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to find out who exactly would be advising the BBC on its scientific view of climate change. He became sceptical stating that he used to watch the BBC’s “coverage of the subject- with growing astonishment”.

The BBC response informed Newbery of the name, date, time, aims, hosts, key speaker and location of the seminar which he could have found out himself from a Google search. But it decided not to publish the list of names of those who attended as participants and/or observers.

“In this case, the information you have requested is outside the scope of the Act because information relating to the seminar is held to help inform the arc’s editorial policy around reporting climate change. The only exception to this is the logistic details you requested…” We've heard something similar before.

In 2007, Newbery referred his application to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for adjudication and in 2008 an investigation began.

“Advising such a body – or in the BBC’s words, providing training – at a formal seminar with a title such as ‘Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting’ can in no way be considered to be a private matter of the kind that could reasonable fall within the scope of the Data Protection Act… It is unreasonable for anyone who embarks on such an exercise to expect to be anonymous”, Newbery said.

On Monday, the court heard that the BBC continues to refuse to hand over the requested information using the following two arguments: refusal is justified for the “purpose of journalism” and that the “attendees of a meeting held under the Chatham House Rule must not be named”.

What nonsense. The case has reached an Information Rights Tribunal – Tony Newbery vs the BBC and the Information Commission.

In Boaden’s words, it has been revealed that the 28 “external invitees” were “representatives from business, campaigners, NGOs, communication experts, people from the ‘front line’, scientists with contrasting views and academics”.

Boaden claimed that it would be unfair to disclose the names and further added: “The seminars bring together individuals who want to share their views but don’t want it widely known that they are there”. This undoubtedly raises the question: why?

It has also come to light this week that the BBC is in for a further grilling over its bias, inaccurate and dishonest reporting – this time from Conservative MP, Peter Lilley.

Lilley has accused the BBC of “systematic bias in its handling of climate change evidence” in a complaint regarding a Newsnight programme Mr Lilley participated in on 5th September 2012.

In the MPs letter to David Jordan, BBC Director of Editorial Policy and Standards, published on The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) website, the MP says; “The BBC cannot credibly suppress the views of those who think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) too alarmist while promoting those who think it too cautious”.

The member of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee further added:

“The BBC has taken the position that the views of ‘climate sceptics’ will not be given airtime since the science has been settled by the IPCC. Inevitably the BBC lays itself open to the charge not just of inconsistency but of backing the side of the argument which gives ammunition to those on the statist, liberal left persuasion who want to control every aspect of the economy – a position with which the BBC has allowed itself to be associated”.

Lord Lawson, the chairman of GWPF has written to Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust to call for an investigation into the complaint made by Mr Lilley and the wider problem.

Lawson says it is “namely the case for the BBC to migrate from its one-sided reportage and propaganda of the conventional wisdom on climate change and climate change policies to a more balanced and objective coverage of this complex and important range of issues”.

[Teddy Bear]

Another article on the subject ties in current events to this topic:

Another BBC scandal: hiding their climate change agenda
Sebastian Payne

While the BBC struggles to deal with its recent bout of self-proclaimed ‘shoddy journalism’, there’s another ethical scandal simmering away. The simple question of ‘who decides how the BBC covers climate change’ has a rather complicated answer. In 2006, the BBC Trust held a seminar entitled ‘Climate Change - the Challenge to Broadcasting’. As m’colleague James Delingpole has written at Telegraph Blogs, the seminar appeared to be far from a healthy debate. One of those in attendance, conservative commentator Richard D North, has gone public with his take on the event:

‘I found the seminar frankly shocking, The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the Corporation) were matched by a equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the ‘we must support Kyoto’ school of climate change activists…
I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed.,I mean that I heard nothing which made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily).

‘Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject … I spent the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.
I argued at the seminar that I thought most broadcasting coverage on climate change was awful. But I also said there was no need for them to become self-conscious about it, This was because, although the issues were scientifically, politically and economically difficult, the BBC’s reporting of the thing would improve as soon as their audience was asked to vote or pay for climate change policy.’

Curious environmental blogger Tony Newbery filed a Freedom of Information request to the Beeb to find out if these accusations were true by asking who were the 28 participants at this seminar. The BBC refused to release the information, citing the seminar was a journalistic endeavour and afforded the protection of sources by law. This is a get-out clause the organisation has used in the past on questioning of their commercial arm BBC Worldwide.

Newbery disagreed and took on the corporation in an information tribunal. Sadly, as the Register reported a few days ago, Newbery has lost his legal battle. Although the blogger is considering an appeal against the settlement, it looks unlikely we will ever find out the names of these individuals who had a mysterious hand in how the BBC should cover climate matters. The organisation went to some extreme efforts to protect the identity of the attendees. From the court session, the Register reports that the BBC was represented at the tribunal by six lawyers, including a cross-examination of Helen Boaden, Auntie’s Head of News who is also tied up in the Jimmy Simmy/Newsnight saga.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. At a time when one of Britain’s great institutions is under huge pressure to appear transparent and open to public scrutiny, trying to cover up their decision making is the wrong approach. Whether you agree with the BBC’s coverage or not, it is a tax-funded organisation with strict orders to be balanced. If it has decided against balance, on one of the biggest questions, the public have a right to know why. If the BBC is to acquire a new broom, this is one area of the corporation that deserves a good sweep.

[Teddy Bear]

As can be seen from this topic here - the list of the names of all those attending this seminar was found by an internet blogger who knew to find it. So regardless of how much money the BBC has spent trying to cover up this information it has now been unearthed.

What else has been revealed by the information concerning the BBC participation at this and other related seminars, shows a lobby of interested parties, internationally based, who have found the means to directly influence BBC reporting, as this topic will show, and probably the reason the BBC did not want to reveal the extent of their participation in these seminars.

[Teddy Bear]

The internet blogger, Maurizio Morabito, who discovered the list of BBC attendees at this seminar has this post today on his website.

Why the List of Participants to the BBC CMEP Jan 2006 Seminar is important

Posted on 2012/11/13 by Maurizio Morabito (omnologos)
updated Nov 13 23:29: those four were not actually “low level”

Yesterday night this site has seen the second large journalistic scoop of my life (so far): “Full List of Participants to the BBC CMEP Seminar on 26 January 2006” (here’s the first one: “World Exclusive: CIA 1974 Document Reveals Emptiness of AGW Scares, Closes Debate On Global Cooling Consensus (And More…)“).

Here’s a summary of why such a list if very important, thanks to Bruce Hoult in a Bishop Hill comment I wish I knew how to link to:

This is incredible. In Jan 2006 the BBC held a meeting of “the best scientific experts” to decide BBC policy on climate change reporting (t)
The BBC has been in court blocking FOI attempts to get the list of the 28 attendees, but it’s just been discovered on the wayback machine (t)
It turns out that only 3 were current scientists (all alarmists). The rest were activists or journalists (t)
The BBC sent four low level representatives: Peter Rippon, Steve Mitchell, Helen Boaden, George Enwistle. All have since risen to power. (t)
Amazingly, those are also the exact four who have thus far resigned this week over the false paedophilia accusations against Lord McAlpine. (t)

For more background read Andrew Montford’s “Conspiracy of Green” and Andrew Orlowski’s recent article “FOlA judges: Secret 28 who made the BBC Green will not be named“.

[Teddy Bear]

With the media, and one supposes the BBC, aware now of the find of this blogger, the greenists are engaged in whatever damage limitation they can to protect the BBC.

So we get articles like this one from Tom Chivers at The Telegraph doing his bit to help the cause, but succeeding more in making himself appear like a complete ass.

Then there's James Delingpole, somebody we can usually depend on to bring real balance into the debate.

28 Gates Later… the BBC's nightmare gets worse and worse!
By James Delingpole


Maurizio Morabito: the BBC's new unfavourite thing

Oh go on then, twist my arm. Even though I've spent all morning writing it up for my Spectator column, I suppose there was no way I was going to get away with not writing a blog about the story du jour: the one they're now calling Twentyeightgate.
This of course follows the unsuccessful attempt by blogger Tony Newbery (Harmless Sky) to get to the truth of the now-infamous January 2006 seminar where the BBC decided to give up even pretending to be balanced on the climate change issue and start reporting it like a full-on Greenpeace activist. The BBC's excuse: clever experts made us do it. But this won't wash now that – thanks to some inspired digging by Maurizio Morabito – the list of the guilty has finally been revealed. (A big thanks to Tony for setting the ball rolling….)

Here are allegedly "the best scientific experts" who attended:

BBC Television Centre, London
Specialists:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
BBC attendees:
Jana Bennett, Director of Television
Sacha Baveystock, Executive Producer, Science
Helen Boaden, Director of News
Andrew Lane, Manager, Weather, TV News
Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC
Dominic Vallely, Executive Editor, Entertainment
Eleanor Moran, Development Executive, Drama Commissioning
Elizabeth McKay, Project Executive, Education
Emma Swain, Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual
Fergal Keane, (Chair), Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Fran Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering
George Entwistle, Head of TV Current Affairs
Glenwyn Benson, Controller, Factual TV
John Lynch, Creative Director, Specialist Factual
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
Jon Williams, TV Editor Newsgathering
Karen O’Connor, Editor, This World, Current Affairs
Catriona McKenzie, Tightrope Pictures [e-mail]
BBC Television Centre, London (cont)
Liz Molyneux, Editorial Executive, Factual Commissioning
Matt Morris, Head of News, Radio Five Live
Neil Nightingale, Head of Natural History Unit
Paul Brannan, Deputy Head of News Interactive
Peter Horrocks, Head of Television News
Peter Rippon, Duty Editor, World at One/PM/The World this Weekend
Phil Harding, Director, English Networks & Nations
Steve Mitchell, Head Of Radio News
Sue Inglish, Head Of Political Programmes
Frances Weil, Editor of News Special Events

Good work, Maurizio. Nice job!

This story is such a target-rich environment, with so many ramifications one could go on writing about it all week. As indeed, I hope we will. For the moment, I highly recommend the comments at Watts Up With That? and also at Bishop Hill. Jo Nova offers a characteristically thorough summary. So too does Andrew Orlowski at The Register. So too does Tallbloke.

The important thing is not to let the scandal lie down and die – as the BBC and its chums at places like the Guardian no doubt hope it will. It can't be said often enough: this is a scandal far more significant than either the Jimmy Savile affair or the Lord McAlpine fiasco. Why? Because those first two were (mostly) cock-ups whereas this one is definitely a cynical and deliberate conspiracy by an institutionally corrupt organisation which has got far too big for its boots.

As Barry Woods notes at Watts Up With That, the scandal goes at least as far back as 2002 with this email (exposed in Climategate 2) by climate activist Mike Hulme.

Did anyone hear Stott vs. Houghton on Today, radio 4 this morning? Woeful
stuff really. This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge
Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source.

Hulme is a slippery customer. In the aftermath of Climategate, he could often be heard on the radio posing as the voice of sweet reason and moderation. Privately, Hulme was one of the arch Post Modern Scientists (read Watermelons for more on this) who helped build the great global warming scam into the Frankenstein's monster it is today. In that private email, he shows his true face. The Stott is Professor Philip Stott – one of the few scientists in the early days prepared publicly to speak out against AGW alarmism; the Houghton is Sir John Houghton, long one of Britain's most shrill and influential alarmists. Hulme's response to this unwelcome balance: to use money from his publicly-funded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to shut down the debate.

Scandalously, he achieved this with one of the BBC's own reporters – the climate activist Roger Harrabin. It was Harrabin – together with another green activist Joe Smith (see list of names above) – who ran the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme. This organised a series of seminars, including the one above, designed to make the BBC's climate science coverage more aggressively alarmist. As we've seen since, these seminars were very effective and have given Harrabin and the rest of his alarmist colleagues (David Shukman, Richard Black etc) an awful lot of self-publicity and airtime.

But what about the BBC's charter obligation to be balanced? What indeed!

Tallbloke sums it up nicely:

So now the BBC has yet another big problem on its hands. It turns out it has lied to the public who pay for it about the makeup of the group which has determined it’s climate reporting policy. This is no small matter considering the billions of pounds involved in the Green energy industry. Additional carbon taxation has directly led to fuel poverty for hundreds of thousands. The excess cold related deaths in the UK have shot up in the last few years. We hear stories of pensioners buying secondhand books by the yard and burning them to keep warm.

This one should run and run. Well I hope so.

[Teddy Bear]

I made the observation a few days ago that it appears anything to do with the BBC that has the word TRUST in it, is definitely to be mistrusted.

Christopher Booker has made the same observation.

The BBC’s 'dirty little secret’ lands it in a new scandal
The truth of a secret meeting that decided BBC policy on climate change has come out online

By Christopher Booker

Unfolding in the shadow of the greatest crisis in the BBC’s 90-year history has been another scandal, rather less publicised, which again reveals how profoundly the BBC has gone off the rails, morally and professionally. Last week, I reported how the BBC had spent large sums of our money fielding an array of lawyers against a pensioner from Wales to hide what I called, with considerable understatement, “a dirty little secret”. But that secret has now been disclosed to the world, confirming how seriously the BBC has been misrepresenting its policy on one of the most far-reaching issues of our time.

A year ago, I published a detailed report attempting to unravel what has long been a serious puzzle. How was it that, over the past six years, the BBC has been so ready to betray its statutory duty to impartiality by such relentlessly one-sided promotion of the scare over global warming and all it entails, such as the Government’s policy on wind farms? No organisation has done more to obscure the truth about an issue whose political and financial implications for us all are incalculable.

The BBC’s decision to defy its charter obligation to report on this subject impartially followed from a secret day-long seminar held at Television Centre on January 26, 2006. It was attended by all the BBC’s top brass, including George Entwistle, the short-lived director-general, then head of TV current affairs, and several executives who have had to “step aside” because of the Savile affair, such as Helen Boaden, then director of news, and Steve Mitchell, then head of radio news.

In 2007, the BBC Trust published a report claiming that this unprecedented decision to flout its charter was taken after a “high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts” on climate change. Among those who tried to get the BBC to identify these “experts” was Tony Newbery, the blogger who recently faced the might of a highly paid legal team which persuaded an information tribunal to uphold the BBC’s right to keep secret the names of those attending this seminar.

When, last week, those names were finally revealed – thanks to another blogger, Maurizio Morabito (see omnilogos.com) and the Wayback Machine, which stores information deleted from the internet – the result was even more startling than had been suspected. Only three of the “28 specialists” invited to advise the BBC were active scientists, none of them climate experts and all committed global-warming alarmists. Virtually all the rest were professional climate-change lobbyists, ranging from emissaries of Greenpeace and the Stop Climate Chaos campaign to the “CO2 project manager” for BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

As shown in my report, “The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal” (on the Global Warming Policy Foundation website), the consequences of what this roomful of “climate activists” advocated as BBC policy were devastating. The seminar’s co-organisers, Roger Harrabin and Joe Smith, were later able to boast that one of the first fruits of their good work was the BBC’s Climate Chaos season, a stream of unashamedly propagandist documentaries, led off with two fronted by Sir David Attenborough which featured a string of ludicrous scare stories.

This was merely the prelude to hundreds of further examples, up to the present day, of how the BBC has abandoned any pretence at honest or properly researched reporting – all in accord with the party line agreed on at that seminar, the nature of which the BBC was so desperate to keep secret.

As with the Savile scandal, there seems no end to the further embarrassments the BBC cover-up has been bringing to light. Harrabin and Smith ran a small outfit set up to lobby the media on global warming, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, WWF and the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate emails scandal).
Stranger still, their co-sponsor of the BBC seminar was another lobbying group calling itself the International Broadcasting Trust, which in the past seven years has received £520,000 from the Department for International Development’s foreign-aid budget for “media research” – which includes lobbying the BBC on issues such as climate change. This body in turn is part of a “coalition” known as the Broadcasting Trust, and one of its partners in that is the Media Trust – of which the BBC is a “corporate member”.

So our climate-change obsessed governments have given public money to bodies to lobby the BBC, including one closely associated with a body that the BBC itself belongs to – all to ensure that the BBC promotes government policy.

There is a scandal here that is, in its own way, as disturbing as the one over the Savile affair. But whereas that is being looked into by a series of inquiries, we can be sure that no one will inquire into this second scandal. Remember, after all, how the BBC Trust (now chaired by that committed warmist Lord Patten) aided the cover-up with that lie about “the best scientific experts” in its 2007 report – which was, laughably, supposed to be addressing the BBC’s statutory commitment to impartiality.

Isn’t it odd how often, through all this, one word recurs: “trust”?