Lack Of Balance Breached BBC Guidelines
More Half-Truths Spread By BBC About Climate Change
Smug, Arrogant King Should Have Been Challenged, Not Humoured
Last night’s Hard Talk with Stephen Sackur on BBC World was a travesty of a programme which kids itself it is grilling guests with tough questions.
By failing to brief himself properly, Sackur made sure the programme breached BBC guidelines, which insist on fairness and balance. (I know, BBC, that you never do, but that’s what the rules say you should do).
Last night’s interviewee was Sir David King, the former chief scientific advisor to the British government and committed warmist. King has a long record of arrogantly insisting he is right about climate change. He once foolishly said it is more dangerous than Islamic terrorism. King regularly dismisses opponents by hurling personal insults rather than engaging them in scientific argument. He says those that disagree with him are all apparently in the pay of big oil or coal, even though the ranks of sceptics are full of eminent and independent climate change experts like Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT and Dr Fred Singer of SEPP. (I could provide Sackur with a massive list of highly qualified scientists for his next climate change interview).
Towards the end of the interview on Hard Talk, King did what he does best – he sought to undermine the reputation of those who deign to disagree with him by hinting that they were corrupted by money. King also dissembled, when he said the science proving human influence over the climate was strengthening. The reverse is the truth.
If Sackur had done his homework, he would have known this was not the case, in spades. Sackur blew the chance to shine light on this issue. Either because he didn’t have the guts to do it, or because he was ill-briefed about the formidable amount of scientific evidence casting doubt on the theory that human activity is changing the climate.
Sackur did admit towards the end of the programme that public opinion wasn’t convinced that human induced global warming was really happening. If he had been properly briefed, he would have quoted the likes of Lindzen and Singer to challenge King, and at least made clear that despite the efforts of the BBC to pretend that the issue is closed, that is far from the truth.
Why does the BBC continually breach its own guidelines about fairness and balance over the issue of climate change? Surely, as the hugely important Copenhagen climate change approaches, the BBC should be seeking to educate the public, not batter it into submission with crude propaganda.
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