Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The BBC: The principal and most willing tool of the AGW movement

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post about a manual for AGW propagandists produced by the left wing think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). The manual was entitled "Warm Words" and can be accessed from the IPPR web site here.

One of the key phrases I highlighted from that manual was this one.

To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The 'facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.

That post was picked up on by a number of bloggers around the world - particularly in Canada - and has given Ranting Stan a somewhat undeserved fame (or notoriety) - and a lot more hits - over the last couple of weeks. I'm not complaining, though. It's nice to get some new visitors to my blog even though the number of hits I get is not that important to me, but having my say is.

Over the last few days I've been checking out what various other bloggers have been saying on the subject of the IPPR manual and it's a bit worrying that some of them have missed a crucial point. Let me refer you to that phrase above again - and a particular section from it "in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications".

Many have assumed that "interested agencies" means environmental pressure groups, NGO's - that sort of thing. Well, it does include those, but the main "agencies" this was aimed at was hidden slightly - though exposed by the phrase "popular communications". Please, please understand that this is aimed at left wing newspapers, such as the Guardian and Independent, but most especially at the BBC who have taken the message on board with enthusiasm. I expect the same is true of the Canadian broadcaster, CBC and of CNN in the USA.

If you watch the BBC you will see frequent evidence of this manual being put into practice. Yesterday was no exception with the weather reporters making frequent connections between the warmest winter on record (actually it was the warmest for 150 years) and linking it to what they referred to as "global warming".

This is the very sort of propaganda that the IPPR meant. The casual acceptance of "global warming" being man-made even though there is no evidence to back that up, the failure to note that we had similar warm winters back in mid-Victorian times, even the assumption that a warm winter in Britain is somehow evidence of a global rise in temperature.

The IPPR is, as mentioned before, the left's favourite think tank -and the BBC is institutionally left wing and crammed to the gills with left leaning sympathisers who greedily snap up anything the IPPR put out - on education, social justice, housing and so on - and give it full exposure. A quick search for IPPR on the BBC site reveals 29 PAGES of available items at 10 items a page. And yet, the only reference I could find to this document on the BBC is an insignificant piece by the Beeb's science correspondent, Richard Black, which focuses almost entirely on the "climate porn" portion of the report - a relatively insignificant part - and does not mention that the document is actually a strategy document at all. As the document itself boldly states ...

This report was commissioned by the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) as part of its project on how to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK. Putting in place effective policies to achieve that is clearly essential, but so too is the use of effective communications. Today in the UK, more stakeholders, including every type of media outlet, the Government, environmental groups and companies, are discussing or communicating on climate change than ever before. (My emphasis)

It's there for all to see. This is a policy document that outlines their strategy to communicate their agenda through every type of media outlet in order to coerce us to their world view. The BBC lapped it up and spew it out daily.

Interestingly, Laban on Biased-BBC has a post on just how seriously the BBC actually take their "green" message.

BBC staff travel 125 million miles a year by air
Blimey, that's a lot. 30 million miles further than the Sun. Commenter J.G. writes :
Fed up as I was with the constant bleating about man-made global warming we get on the BBC, I thought I would find out just what they are doing to help the planet. So I put in a FOI request asking about the air miles the BBC fly, the carbon that this produces, and how the BBC offsets this. Get ready for some amazing numbers (all relate to the last reporting year):


Total UK domestic flights: 17 million miles
Total European flights: 14 million miles
Other flights: 94 million miles
Total air miles: 125 million
Total cost: £15,147,000
TOTAL CO2 EMISSIONS: 25,676,000 Kgs
TOTAL CO2 OFFSET: 0 kgs. Yes, 0 Kg.
The FOI document is
here.

So while the BBC preach at us to be good little citizens they swan around the world lording it over us.

2 comments:

David Vance said...

Typical leftist hypocrisy! Must link this one to ATW Stan - when I ran the Rev Al Gore energy hypocrisy the moonbats went into denial!

Stan said...

Feel free, David. To give the leftists and moonbats their due, they do hypocrisy and denial very well.