Defaming journalism on the OPCW’s Syria cover-up scandal, The Guardian and its NATO-funded sources out themselves as the real “network of conspiracy theorists.”
The article is based on what Townsend calls a “new analysis” that “reveals” a “network more than two dozen conspiracy theorists, frequently backed by a coordinated Russian campaign.” This network, Townsend claims, is “focused on the denial or distortion of facts about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons and on attacking the findings of the world’s foremost chemical weapons watchdog,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). According to Townsend, I am named “as the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among the nefarious bunch.
In hawking this purported exposé of “disinformation”, Townsend violated every basic standard of journalism. He did not contact me before publishing his allegations; fails to offer a shred of evidence for them; and does not cite a single example of my alleged “prolific” disinformation. Instead, Townsend bases his claims entirely on a think-tank report that also provides no evidence, nor even assert that I have said anything false. In the process, Townsend failed to disclose that the report’s authors — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign — are groups funded by the US government and other belligerents in the Syria proxy war. To top it off, Townsend fabricates additional allegations that his state-funded sources do not even make.
As a result, Townsend and the Guardian have engaged in the exact sort of conduct that they falsely impute to me and others: spreading Syria-related disinformation with coordinated support from state-funded actors. The aim of this propaganda network is transparent: defaming journalism that exposes the OPCW’s ongoing Syria cover-up scandal and the dirty war waged by Western powers on Syria.
The OPCW cover-up is arguably the most copiously documented pro-war deception since the US-led drive to invade Iraq. In Western media, as The Guardian’s behavior newly demonstrates, it is also without question the most suppressed.
At the center of the story are two veteran OPCW scientists, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. The pair were among a team that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma. They have since accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the Douma probe to reach a conclusion that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack. Their claims are backed up by a trove of leaked documents and emails that show extensive doctoring and censoring of the Douma team’s findings.
The Douma cover-up extends far beyond the OPCW’s executive suite. It also implicates NATO governments led by the US, which bombed Syria over the Douma chemical weapons allegation, and then, weeks later, privately pressured the OPCW to validate it. Since the OPCW scandal became public, the US and its allies have thwarted efforts to address it.
At the most criminal level, the scandal implicates sectarian death squads armed and funded by the US and allies during their decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria.
At the time of the incident, Douma was occupied by the Saudi-backed jihadi militia Jaysh-al-Islam and under bombardment from Syrian army forces attempting to retake control. Shortly before their surrender, local allies of Jaysh-al-Islam accused Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released gruesome footage of an apartment building filled with slain civilians. A gas cylinder was filmed positioned above a crater on the roof. Concurrently, the White Helmets, a NATO and Gulf state-funded, insurgent-adjacent organization, released footage of what it claimed were gas attack victims in a Douma field hospital. Several journalists, including Riam Dalati of the BBC, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and James Harkin of the Intercept, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati claimed that he can “prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.” Oddly, more than three years later, he has not released his findings).
The White Helmets’ alleged fakery of a chemical attack aftermath, coupled with the censored OPCW findings showing no evidence that a chemical attack occurred, suggest the inescapable conclusion that insurgents in Douma carried out a deception to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of the more than 40 victims filmed in the Douma apartment building, that deception may have entailed a murderous war crime.
Unlike the Iraq WMD hoax, the very existence of the OPCW’s Douma scandal is unknown to much of the Western world. With few exceptions, establishment media outlets have refused to acknowledge the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that brought their story to light.
After largely ignoring the OPCW cover-up since it first surfaced in May 2019, the Guardian has now published defamatory claims about journalists, myself included, who have dared to report on the censored facts.
When I wrote The Guardian about the Townsend article’s journalistic lapses, I did not get a response. One week later, I phoned Townsend, who was now back in the office but had yet to reply. In our conservation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked Townsend to substantiate his claims about me and identify even a single example of my alleged disinformation.
Townsend did not attempt to defend his article’s assertions, beyond claiming that they were based on what was “in a report.” When I pressed further, he claimed that he had to “dash for a meeting” and promised that I would soon hear from the paper’s reader’s editor. (Before I published our phone call, and this article, I emailed Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to offer any additional comment. He did not respond).
“Deadly Disinformation”
Townsend could not provide any evidence for his assertions because the report that he parroted offers none as well.
The report, titled “Deadly Disinformation” and authored by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign, contains bare references to my reporting and makes no effort to refute it. Nowhere does the report even claim that I have said anything false. It simply claims to have “identified 28 individuals, outlets and organisations who have spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict,” and that I am “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among them.
When the report bothers to mention of anything that I have actually said, it engages in distortion. In its first mention, the report states that I wrote an article that “attacks Bellingcat for its contributions to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” Here, they not only fail to assert that I said anything false, but offer a false portrayal of what happened.
As for “attacking” Bellingcat — a website that, like the report’s authors, is funded by NATO states that were belligerents in the Syria dirty war – what I really did was expose its disinformation.
In short, the ISD/Syria Campaign’s first purported example of my alleged “disinformation” is an easily verifiable case where I’ve exposed state-backed lies.
The report’s only other substantive example comes when it notes that I have argued that the OPCW probe’s Douma probe “was flawed.” This far understates my case: the OPCW’s Douma investigation wasn’t “flawed”; it’s a scandalous cover-up worthy of global attention. Regardless, yet again, the report does not even assert that my argument is false, let alone try to explain why.
In a July 13th email, I asked the ISD to substantiate their claim that I have spread disinformation, and provide even one example of it. On its website, the ISD claims to “take complaints seriously,” and promises a response “within ten working days.” As of this writing, after 13 working days, I have not heard back.
At The Guardian, OPCW leaks are “problematic”
When I emailed a complaint about Townsend’s reporting, The Guardian admitted fault only on failing to contact me before publishing his evidence-free allegations. This was the result, they claimed, of a “breakdown of communication internally.” I was then offered the chance to respond to the article in 200 words.
A key point in my reply (which can be read here) was that The Guardian and its state-funded source is unable to identify any falsehoods in anything I’ve written “because my reporting on the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal is based on damning OPCW leaks.” These leaks, I added, “reveal that veteran inspectors found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, and that expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the victims’ cause of death. But these findings were doctored and censored by senior OPCW officials.”
At The Guardian, this passage set off an apparent alarm. After disparaging my reporting on the OPCW leaks, The Guardian informed me that they would now prevent me from even mentioning them. In a July 8 email, a Guardian editor wrote that the “the part about the OPCW” in my reply “continues to be problematic.” My reference to the OPCW leaks, the editor claimed, “makes an assertion that has been rebutted by an independent inquiry.”
I responded by asking the editor to specify exactly which “assertion” of mine has been rebutted. I also proposed that, if they believe that I have said anything “problematic,” they publish their own rebuttal.
In multiple follow-up emails, the editor failed to identify any “rebutted” assertion of mine. Despite that, the Guardian proceeded to publish my reply without its reference to the OPCW leaks. But this raised a new problem: in censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out that error, they updated my reply to finally allow a (minimal) mention of the OPCW leaks.
The Guardian also took me up on my proposal that they publish their own rebuttal:
Editor’s note: Both the ISD and the Syria Campaign list a diverse range of funders and describe themselves as “fiercely independent”. In 2020 the OPCW rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident (Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack).
As for the “inquiry” that The Guardian claims “rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident,” the inquiry was not independent, and did not rebut anything.
The “inquiry” was appointed by the OPCW’s Director General’s office, the very body that presided over the cover-up. It was also staffed by two “investigators” from the US and UK. These happen to be the two states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegations that the OPCW fraudulently validated, and that have since tried to bury the scandal at every stage.
As for what the Guardian calls the ISD and Syria Campaign’s “diverse range of funders,” both groups indeed enjoy a diverse range of funders: everyone from NATO governments to NATO government-funded organizations. They also receive support from billionaire-funded foundations that often work in concert with these same NATO governments’ foreign policy objectives.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s “diverse range of funders,” according to The Guardian.
The ISD’s “diverse” funders include the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other US state-funded organizations, and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies. On the private side, the ISD’s funders include the foundations of three of the world’s richest oligarchs: Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In using the ISD as a source, The Guardian has a conflict of interest that its article did not disclose. The latter two ISD donors have also given sizeable grants to The Guardian: at least $625,000 from Open Society Foundations since 2019, and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
Omidyar’s foundation has a direct role in the ISD/Syria Campaign report. The Omidyar Group’s Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed alongside the German government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation as the report’s fiscal sponsor.
Omidyar’s sponsorship of an attack on journalism about the OPCW scandal is highly fitting. The Intercept, the self-described “fearless and adversarial” outlet that Omidyar also funds with his vast fortune, has never once acknowledged the OPCW leaks or whistleblowers’ existence. While ignoring the OPCW scandal for more than three years, The Intercept has published multiple articles promoting the allegation that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.
Like the ISD, the Syria Campaign is also funded by governments and other belligerents in the Syria dirty war. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported in 2017, the Syria Campaign was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire oil tycoon and leading financial supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group established after the Syria conflict erupted in 2011. The Syria Campaign has also done extensive P.R. and fundraising for the White Helmets, the insurgent-adjacent, NATO state-funded organization implicated in the Douma incident.
That these two state-funded groups “describe themselves as ‘fiercely independent'” is apparently enough for The Guardian. I trust that the Guardian would feel differently if they were dealing with self-described “fiercely independent” groups funded by the Russian and Syrian governments.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sources quoted in the ISD/Syria Campaign report are funded or employed by the same NATO state and private sponsors. This includes the White Helmets; the Global Public Policy Institute; Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS); self-described journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou of the BBC, who produced a podcast series that disparaged the OPCW whistleblowers and whitewashed the Douma cover-up; and James Jeffrey, the former US Special Envoy for Syria.
For a report that claims to be concerned with protecting Syrians from “real-world harm,” Jeffrey is a particularly interesting interview subject. Few US officials have been as candid about their willingness to immiserate Syrian civilians in pursuit of hegemonic US goals in their country.
Jeffrey’s proudly self-acknowledged real-world harms on millions of Syrians don’t seem to bother the study’s authors, presumably because their Western state sponsors implement them.
The report is so invested in its state funders’ aims in Syria that it approvingly airs frustration that other governments are failing to toe the NATO line. A “former Western diplomat” complains that “disinformation” on Syria is helping states “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make, say in the Security Council or elsewhere.” (emphasis added). From the point of view of Western officials, the anonymous diplomat is employing an accurate operative definition of what constitutes “disinformation”: any information that causes those deemed subordinate to “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make.”
Fittingly, another anonymous “senior diplomat” laments that supposed Syria disinformation is intended “ultimately to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the people doing this kind of [policy] work.” Daring to question the “legitimacy and integrity” of Western policymakers who oversaw a multi-billion dollar CIA-led dirty war on Syria that knowingly empowered al-Qaeda and other sectarian death squads while leaving hundreds of thousands dead — another intolerable act that can only result from “disinformation.”
A member of the US-funded, insurgent-adjacent White Helmets is also given space to lament that alleged “disinformation” is hurting its donations. “We hear about billions of dollars for aid at conferences on Syria but most of that funding goes to the UN,” a White Helmets manager complains. Unmentioned is that European governments have cut funding to the group after their late founder, the lavishly paid UK military veteran James le Mesurier, admitted to pocketing donor funds and financial fraud right before he took his own life.
Having promoted the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, the report closes with a thinly veiled call to censor the dissenting voices it targets.
The ISD and Syria Campaign urge policymakers to “adopt a whole-of-government approach in tackling disinformation” and “ensure that loopholes or special privileges are not created for ‘media’ which would only exacerbate the spread of disinformation.” These “privileges” presumably refer to free speech. The report also notes favorably that platforms have addressed “thematic harms such as public health disinformation or foreign interference in elections.” As a result, the report calls on these platforms to “commit to applying similar levels of resourcing… in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict.” Perhaps they have in mind the censorship of journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, on the fake grounds that the story was “Russian disinformation.”
The fact that this network of state-funded actors is devoting energy to disparaging journalism about the OPCW’s Syria cover-up — and even advocating that it be censored – reflects their powerful sponsors’ desperation to bury a damning scandal.
On top of the two known whistleblowers, Arias has ignored calls for accountability from his original predecessor, founding OPCW chief Jose Bustani, as well as four other former senior OPCW officials. Along with Bustani, former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck has spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, a global initiative to address the OPCW scandal. The US has responded to Bustani by blocking his testimony at the United Nations. Arias meanwhile refused to open a letter that he received from Sponeck’s group, returning it back to sender.
The response of Western media outlets like the Guardian to the stonewalling of these veteran diplomats and senior OPCW officials has simply been to ignore it.
In whitewashing the OPCW cover-up, the preponderance of state sources parroted by The Guardian reveals the ultimate irony in its allegations. While claiming to “identify” a fictional network of Russia-backed disinformation actors about Syria, The Guardian’s Townsend is himself spreading the disinformation of a NATO-funded network that defames voices who expose the dirty war on Syria.
In fact, one of Townsend’s central allegations goes well beyond his state-funded sources. Although Townsend’s article is premised on identifying a “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend’s sole source – the ISD/Syria Campaign report – never alleges that such a “network” exists. Nowhere in the report does the word “network” even appear.
Thus, Townsend has not only parroted state-funded sources, but concocted an additional allegation in the service of their narrative. This is not just an ordinary fabrication: in creating the fantasy of a “coordinated”, “Russia-backed”, “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend also reveals himself to be the very thing that he accuses his targets of being: a conspiracy theorist.
And given that Townsend not only parrots his state-backed sources but works for an outlet funded by some of the same sponsors, it is fair to say that The Guardian and these state-funded think tanks are a part of the same network.
Consequently, reading the article’s headline — “Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”—as a description of The Guardian and the NATO-funded sources that it relied on, the claim is no longer inaccurate.
BBC has a new article out, about the “origins of Covid-19”:
Great, right? If BBC says that Covid origin studies point to the Wuhan seafood market as the source of Sars-Cov-2, then it must be so, right? After all, we trust the BBC and we especially trust science and scientific studies.
BBC’s map of early cases clustering around the market, offers the only real evidence that the BBC article provides, and looks extremely convincing:
Again, the dots represent the first recorded cases of Covid-19. The circled “X”’s are WIV and WIID. Please tell me, after seeing the second picture, are you still sure about the Wuhan’s market being the source? If you are capable of elementary thinking, which all of my subscribers certainly are, you would think that the BBC article is total bunk. And of course, you would be right!
So:
Why did BBC’s map exclude locations of WIV and WIID, which are obviously known to anyone in the news business who is writing about Covid, and are critically important to the story if they wanted to tell it truthfully?
Because if the article included these locations, it would be obvious to any reader that the article is total nonsense and is a completely laughable attempt at misdirection.
Therefore, BBC wanted to lie to us and mislead us by omission.
Okay, then, why did BBC decide to lie to us?
It lied because if BBC showed locations of WIV and WIID on the map, the story of Covid would sound something like this:
Dear Citizens! By pure accident, a Chinese virological laboratory released an experimental deadly virus, whose creation was funded by the NIH. But do not worry: purely by coincidence, NIH scientists also worked on a vaccine against such viruses. We are very fortunate that Moderna, with NIH help, in just TWO DAYS, was able to design a perfect vaccine against Sars-Cov-2. Never mind that previous vaccines took decades to develop. Science works faster now!
Dear Readers: you must take this vaccine. We are certain that it works and if you get vaccinated, you will not get the virus. The virus stops with every vaccinated person. If you do not take our vaccine, you will be fired from your job, will be excluded from society, and will starve for disrespecting science and authorities. This vaccine is safe for pregnancy because there is no proof that it is unsafe for pregnancy (we made sure of that).
The crazy right-wing conspiracists, rogue scientists, and discredited doctors warning that the vaccine is not safe, have been fired from their jobs, lost medical licenses, and were removed from social networks and Google. Therefore, we now have total scientific and medical consensus about the vaccine. Please believe us, because all NIH-funded scientists and still-licensed doctors agree with us. If you do not believe this, you are an ignorant, anti-science fool and a “winter of death” awaits you.
Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated!
That would be a strange and somewhat less believable story, right? It would be much easier to deal with the general public if the public believed that the virus came from Wuhan’s “wet market”. That’s why BBC is publishing such obviously dishonest articles.
This past week, both the U.S. and Europe have had significant localized heatwaves. The one in Europe is particularly bothersome for the media, since the area is not prepared for temperatures that exceed 100°F like areas in the in the United States in places like California, Texas, and Oklahoma, where air conditioners are the norm, regularly experience. The mainstream media has uniformly blamed the heatwaves on human caused climate change. This attribution is wrong.
The headlines have been truly apoplectic, and absolutely wrong. For example:
Every summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it gets hot; that’s what summers do. Also, every year, a localized heatwave occurs somewhere in the world.
The error that is common to all of these news articles is the fact that weather is not climate.
Weather is an event that might last for minutes to a few days. A heatwave is a weather event that is typically linked to large scale weather patterns, such as a high-pressure cell which can create heat-domes in the summer. Climate is an average of weather over a thirty-year period as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. Note my highlights:
Each of these stories trying to link climate change to the heat wave does so without any proof whatsoever. They are nothing more than speculative fearmongering.
And, it isn’t limited to print and Internet media, the TV stations are overhyping it as well to make it seem like a crisis with the use of color. Figure 1 is a comparison of TV graphics on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Summer 2012, versus Summer 2022.
Figure 1: Comparison of TV weather Maps from the BBC in summer 2012, left, and summer 2022 right. Source: BBC
Note that in 2012, some of the temperatures were actually higher, and they didn’t need to fill in areas with red to make it look worse than it actually is.
Another thing that you won’t find reported in the BBC on in the newspapers/Internet media is the fact that while record heat was going on in Western Europe, Eastern Europe was experiencing well below average temperatures. Figure 2 below shows the juxtaposition of heat in the UK and Europe compared to the below normal temperatures in Eastern Europe, which the press has ignored.
Figure 2: Surface Temperature map for UK and Europe on July 19, 2022. Image from ECMWF output via WeatherBell Inc.
That dramatic regional temperature difference seen in Figure 2 is a sure sign of this being a weather pattern, and not global scale climate change aka global warming as the media would have you believe. The same applies to the heat wave in the U.S. as seen in Figure 3. It is regional in its scope, not global.
Figure 3: Maximum Temperature for the Contiguous United States July 21, 2022. Source NOAA
… in recent decades in the United States, heat waves have been far less frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s.
The all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century.
The heat wave of 1936 was far deadlier. To their credit, The Washington Post got it right in this report:
The killer U.S. heat wave of 1936 spread as far north as Canada, led to the heat-related deaths of an estimated 5,000 people, sent thermometers to a record 121 degrees Fahrenheit in Steele, N.D., and made that July the warmest month ever recorded in the United States.
But the real issue is that extended high temperatures like the U.S. and Europe have experienced this month have happened before climate change became the universal go-to for blame. It only takes a small amount of research to discover these facts.
A search of the term heatwaves, on Wikipedia, for instance, finds that a heatwave and drought in 1540 in Europe lasted for 11 months, and that a heatwave in 1757 was the hottest in the past 500 years until 2003. Also, Netweather Community TV, called the 1906 heatwave in the U.K during August and September, “one of the most exceptional heatwaves to ever occurred in the UK.” A 1911 heatwave in France contributed to more than 41,000 premature deaths. More recently, in Europe, there was a massive months-long heat wave in 1976. This came at a time when the Earth was experiencing a 30 year cooling trend, that led many scientists to warn the next ice age was looming. Wikipedia’s entry on the 1976 event reports:
The summer of 1976 was considered to be the hottest summer in Europe, and especially the United Kingdom, during the 20th century. A large high-pressure area dominated most of Europe for all of the summer months. The pressure system moved into place in late May 1976 and remained until the first traces of rain were recorded on 27 August.
. . .
For the entire period much of Europe was bathed in continual sunshine with the United Kingdom seeing an average of more than 14 hours of sunshine per day. 1976 was dubbed “the year of the ladybird” in that country due to the rise in the mass numbers of the insect brought on by the long hot period. In the United Kingdom, the summer coincided with a 16-week dry spell, the longest recorded over England and Wales since 1727.
That high pressure pattern is almost identical to what has been seen in UK and Europe today. The difference is that the media today immediately goes to blame climate change rather than weather patterns, and in the case of this article in TheNew York Times, they even try to convince you that comparisons between the hot summers of 1976 and 2022 are somehow “misleading.”
“Yet the comparison to 1976 is misleading. The highest recorded temperature then was 35.9 degrees Celsius, whereas on Tuesday it surpassed 40 degrees.”
“Thermometers hit 40.3C at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, while 33 other locations went past the UK’s previous highest temperature of 38.7C, set in 2019.”
Figure 4. Graph of Temperature at RAF Base Coningsby for July 19th, 2022 showing a max temp of 104°F, Source: WeatherUndergroud.com
What the BBC and the NYT don’t tell you is that the 40 degree Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) was set at a Royal Air Force (RAF) base next to the heat absorbing sea of runway asphalt and tarmac. Figure 4 shows the temperature hour-by-hour that day and where it was recorded.
By contrast, the BBC reports “… the [previous] highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom was 101.7 degrees, observed in Cambridge [at Cambridge University Botanic Garden] in July 2019.“
A botanical garden is an entirely different environment than an RAF air base. The latter would be expected to be much warmer due to the lack of shade, the heat absorbing materials present, and the hot air expelled from jet engines. So, the “misleading” claim of the NYT is really about the lack of solid journalism in reporting the environment under which these temperatures were recorded.
It is well-known that the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect can contribute to warmer high temperatures, and given the UK went from 56 million people in 1976 to 67 million in 2020, it isn’t the least bit surprising that the UHI increased as infrastructure to support that 11 million extra people was added to that island nation.
The truth and overwhelming scientific evidence provide a different story: the recent European heatwave is mainly the result of natural processes but was enhanced modestly by human-caused global warming.
The situation is very much like the [Pacific] Northwest heatwave of last summer; with many of the same elements.
…
The bottom line is that the recent European heat wave was caused by an amplification of the northern hemisphere wave pattern, with global warming contributing perhaps 5-10% of the warmth. Natural variability of the atmosphere was the proximate cause of the warmth and does not represent an existential threat to the population of Europe.
Clearly, there’s no cause for alarm, no matter what the media says. But the media won’t tell you any of that, because it ruins their narrative of being able to blame the heatwave on climate change, while hoping you don’t notice their distortion of the truth about ordinary weather events we see every summer.
ONE thing I will say about Wednesday night’s BBC programme Unvaccinated is that it had to be seen to believed. It managed to be patronising, ignorant, selective and abusive all at the same time. I doubt if even my extraordinary talents can quite convey the level of vaccine propaganda that the national broadcaster engaged in.
If you did not see it, Unvaccinated (available on iPlayer) was a programme whereby the BBC picked a group of people who have exercised their right to medical choice and bodily autonomy and decided not to be injected with an mNRA ‘vaccine’, and got them together, Big Brother-style, in an attempt to change their minds. They were subject to a regime of gaslighting, ‘heated debate’ and an odd jelly-bean experiment. Along the way to help these poor ignoramuses see the error of their ways were a presenter, The Scientists and some bloke from Full Fact, ‘the UK’s independent fact checking organisation’.
The low point was when a young participant explained how a friend started having seizures days after her first jab. This has devastated her life. Unsurprisingly this made the attendee ‘hesitant’ about receiving the Covid vaccine. The response from the presenter was, How can you be sure it was the vaccine that caused the seizures? Maybe it was something else? Just how is a young girl supposed to prove that a serious side-effect such as a seizure was not caused by the vaccine taken only days earlier? As she rightly pointed out, given the age of the victim, it is highly unlikely that this would have occurred naturally. But it’s not impossible, replied the presenter. Sure, it is not impossible, just like pigs might indeed sprout wings and fly.
This gaslighting came after a lengthy session on how mild side-effects are often imagined. Placebo side-effects were real – namely if you thought you would get a side-effect then you were more likely to experience this side-effect. So, you just imagined that blood clot.
Then there was a discussion on myocarditis – this was when the jelly-beans came out to demonstrate how unlikely it is one would suffer such a side-effect after the vaccine. You are more likely to suffer myocarditis from Covid, we were told. The jelly-bean experiment didn’t seem to convince anyone, and positively enraged one attendee.
Then the Unvaccinated met The Scientists, who explained how they were able to develop the mNRA vaccine in an ‘unprecedented’ time scale: ‘The vaccines that we are using in this country at the moment are quite different from vaccines that we have used in the past.’ (They certainly are.)
They were developed at such breakneck, too-good-to-be-true, never-before-done-in-the-history-of-mankind speed because they got critical information from China. The Scientist explains, ‘We were able to get the code for the spike protein on the virus within a matter of weeks from China, and that code was enough to make the spike protein.’ (I am sure you are fully reassured now, dear reader. The code for the spike protein came from China. So you’re all good.) That didn’t really fill me with confidence, I have to say. (For some very real worries about this rushed vaccine, turn to Paula Jardine’s disturbing report for TCW here.)
The other reason for the high-speed development and rollout was, according to the presenter, who heard it from an academic, good old ‘bureaucracy’, or at least the lack of it. Allegedly, all The Scientists were able to clear their diaries so they could make meetings immediately instead of three months down the line and, ta-dah – the vaccine appears! ‘They got rid of everything else in their diary and this was the priority.’ Praise be.
The gang at Full Fact got a slot to explain all about the trouble with ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ and all the rest of it.
The biggest elephant in the room was the fact that the virus presents little if any threat to the attendees, who were all young. If the risk of the virus to the attendees isn’t analysed then there is no point in talking about how likely mild or serious the side-effects of the vaccine are.
Much of the programme came down to emotion v The Science and the manipulation of statistics, in particular confusing causation with correlation. It is right we should always be careful of statistics. Ultimately, however, I believe the attendees’ gut instinct is against this vaccine but these days, emotion or instinct is routinely dismissed. Nothing can come above The Science, and The Charts and The Technocrats and The Experts. Sir Roger Scruton defended instinct as an entirely appropriate way upon which to make a decision. It is another word for wisdom and common sense built up over a lifetime of experience. One can apply common sense and wisdom when considering the advice given by an expert, but that advice should not trump the commonsense decision which has to be made by the ordinary person.
Experience tells me that in the face of a virus which presents a tiny risk to me, or indeed anyone, it is best not to be injected with a vaccine developed in record time using an entirely new method and relying on information from communist-run China.
My life experience tells me I have an immune system and I trust that more that the government, Big Pharma, China or indeed the BBC. In fact, when a jury consider a verdict in a criminal trial they are directed to apply their common sense and life experience when considering the evidence and coming to a verdict. If common sense is good enough to convict someone of a criminal offence, it should be good enough when considering whether to have a vaccine.
One of the attendees observed that you have only one life and one body, so you have to be careful what you put into it. That really sums it up. Despite the BBC’s best efforts, I doubt that they will have changed any minds with this programme.
The BBC is either the worst media organisation on Earth or the best, depending upon your perspective. On the one hand it is a truly world-class propaganda machine. On the other it is completely incapable of challenging government narratives or power because it is effectively a branch of the UK government and is itself beholden to power.
As an agency of the state, the BBC has actively sought to destabilise overseas governments around the world. It is a master of propaganda and frequently lies to the public, either overtly or by omission, with the goal of convincing the people to accept whatever falsehood or agenda it has been tasked to sell.
From top to bottom, the BBC’s commitment to journalistic integrity is missing. It is simply a mouthpiece for the ruling cartel. It comprehensively fails to deliver the most crucial social function of journalism: holding power to account.
According to the corporation’s published values, “trust is the foundation of the BBC.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers a pejorative meaning of the word “trust”: “acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation.”
This definition of “trust” seems appropriate for the BBC. While it declares itself to be “independent, impartial and truthful,” it routinely trots out claimed “facts” that lack supporting evidence and produces investigative reports absent any real investigation. Indeed, the BBC broadcasts appalling lies as a matter of course.
And so it is with a certain degree of mirth that we now learn from the BBC that it intends to air a “documentary” about a phenomenon it has already opted to call “vaccine hesitancy.” (Bear in mind: A “documentary” is “a film or television or radio programme that gives facts and information about a subject.”)
The producer of the upcoming programme, due to air on the 20th of July, Craig Hunter, explains:
Moving beyond the often misrepresented debate, this programme reveals why some people remain vaccine hesitant.
The deprecatory word “hesitant” means “tentative, unsure, or slow in acting.” There is no room in the programme-maker’s minds for the possibility that people who chose to remain “unvaccinated” have considered the risk-benefit of these shots, have looked at the available evidence and have decisively concluded that they don’t want a COVID-19 jab.
Hunter’s statement absolutely “misrepresents” the debate. As Craig is the producer of the forthcoming BBC documentary, it seems the chance of the programme delivering a balanced exploration of the issue is remote to non-existent. There is little reason to expect the BBC to provide anything that is “independent, impartial and truthful.”
Indeed, objectively discussing any facet of the alleged pandemic is way beyond the reach of the BBC. As a state propaganda operation, all it can do is parrot the official narrative spouted by the government and its partners, who are, in this instance, the pharmaceutical corporations.
. . . confronting the latest science and statistics to emerge in the field and dissecting how misinformation spreads on social media.
The BBC cannot succeed in this task because the science and the statistics rarely support the disinformation it has been commissioned to spread. Consequently, it must deceive and misdirect its audience to make sure they believe its propagandist tripe. More to the point, the BBC is itself one of the most prolific distributors of online misinformation.
For example, in its press release the BBC says:
After multiple lockdowns and more than 197,000 deaths, experts are warning we’re now entering a fifth wave of the pandemic. So why are five million adults in the UK still yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine?
Putting aside for the moment that there are actually more than eleven million UK adults yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine and the fact that the BBC itself reported that there were just three million less than a week later, the rest of this claim assumes, without good reason, that there was a “pandemic” in the first place. We now know there is very little evidence that a genuine pandemic ever occurred, yet the BBC keeps up its charade by omitting key facts.
Here is one such key fact: In 2009 the World Health Organisation (WHO) suddenly and radically changed its long-time definition of the word “pandemic.” It removed the defining phrase “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness,” replacing it with reference to a disease for which “most people do not have immunity.” Under this definition, practically any new disease can be declared a pandemic. But the BBC won’t inform its audience of the WHO’s changed definition nor the fact that under the original, and more valid, definition, COVID-19 disease could never have been described as a pandemic.
The BBC has left its audience in the dark about a number of other important facts: (1) as of the 19th of March 2020, UK public health authorities did not consider COVID-19 to be “a high-consequence infectious disease” due to its low mortality; (2) all-cause mortality (the overall death rate) in 2020, the year of the so-called “outbreak,” ranked as only the 9th highest death rate in the first two decades of the 21st century; (3) people with injured limbs and stomach pain were being admitted to hospital as registered COVID-19 patients, thus giving an entirely false impression of a severe pandemic disease; (4) there is no statistical evidence of any beneficial effect from any supposed COVID-19 vaccine; and (5) many deaths have been caused, not by any single disease, but by the policy response to an alleged pandemic.
In the press release for its upcoming “documentary,” the BBC refers to the figure of 197,000 UK deaths from COVID-19 as if that figure is scientifically or statistically indisputable. Not only can it be questioned, it has been! So why doesn’t the BBC mention this?
By deliberately using the largest possible figure, the BBC is attempting to elicit an emotional reaction to the highly questionable number of supposed COVID deaths. The BBC is playing on people’s emotions in order to avoid any objective analysis of the data. Its intention is to manipulate its audience into unquestioning acceptance of a story about a severe pandemic which does not stand up to scrutiny.
Let’s pause to make an important point: The collection, analysis and reporting of COVID-19 mortality data has been deliberately altered and manipulated by governments around the world, all of which worked and continue to work in partnership with the WHO. Nowhere has this manipulation been more pronounced than in the UK, where the engineering of COVID-19 mortality statistics has been quite remarkable.
Mainstream media outlets, especially the BBC, have perpetuated baseless fearmongering. For example, for the first time in the history of reporting deaths from a respiratory disease, propagandists like the BBC are reporting cumulative deaths instead of the annual mortality rates or the more common seasonal variation in these figures. If the same were done for, say, influenza, total flu deaths would be measured in millions, depending on the chosen start date for the accumulation of the mortality data.
Another example: The BBC has chosen to report what the government claims to be “deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate.” While some of these likely were genuine COVID-19 deaths, the expansive, all-encompassing methodology that the government and the WHO created to attribute as many deaths as possible to COVID-19 renders the bulk of these statistics virtually meaningless. In truth, we don’t know how many people in the UK have died as a direct consequence of COVID-19, though estimates in the region of 20,000 – 25,000 seem reasonable.
The BBC never questions the mortality statistics. It simply takes the figures from the government and reports them without any investigation or analysis. This is essentially the BBC’s purpose: to report whatever it is told to report.
In announcing its faux documentary, the BBC says:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why eight percent of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
In reality, more than twenty percent of adults in the UK are “unvaccinated.” The BBC can’t even write a press release for its forthcoming documentary without publishing deceptive statistics. So it is safe to say the “documentary” itself will be little more than a marketing promotion for the jabs.
Statistics from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on vaccine coverage in England show that the actual percentage of the “unvaccinated” population is very close to thirty percent, not the eight percent the BBC alleges. The English figures are broadly representative of the UK as a whole and can be extrapolated.
Jab uptake increases with age. Thus, if we exclude children under 18, then more than twenty percent of the UK adult population are unvaccinated.
The subsequent uptake of booster jabs has declined markedly from the one-and-two dose uptake. Millions of Brits decided, for whatever reason, that two shots was their limit. Only fifty-two percent have elected to have the first booster (the third jab).
Speaking in December 2021, then-Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that, in order to be considered fully vaccinated for the proposed “covid pass,” one would need to have three jabs. If three becomes the definition of “fully vaccinated,” which seems unlikely given the lack of interest, then currently forty-eight percent of the total UK population, and more than thirty-five percent of the adult population, are not “fully vaccinated.”
The BBC launched its “documentary” by trying to deceive its audience into believing that there is only a tiny fringe minority of indecisive folk who don’t want the COVID jabs. In point of fact, it is nearly half of the UK population.
Not only has the BBC lied about the statistics in its press release, it has even misrepresented the debate it proposed to examine by calling the millions of people who made an informed decision not to have the jabs “hesitant.” But that’s because the BBC is all about propaganda, not journalism.
When some diligent independent researchers did what real journalists are supposed to do and picked up on the BBC’s deception, the BBC simply changed its press release. Since citing real statistics was a bit too tricky for the BBC—after all, it only has an annual budget of around £5 billion—the revisedweb page now reads:
In this timely, eye-opening investigation [. . .] Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why a portion of the population remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
Despite there being no reason to trust anything the BBC ever says, the broadcaster implores its viewers to “trust” it simply by pronouncing its own trustworthiness. For the BBC, your “trust” demonstrates your “faith,” allowing it to tell you stories without the need for investigative journalism or even supporting evidence. By contrast, the evidence invariably reveals that the BBC is completely untrustworthy.
According to BBC, its so-called “documentary” is going to be based on bombarding seven hapless unvaccinated lay people with a barrage of pro-vaccine “experts.” Once browbeaten into submission by these authoritative opinions, the victims will then be subject to the BBC’s logical fallacy tactic of appeal to authority. In other words, these high priests of “the science” will explain how the BBC’s seven victims have been misled by “anti-vaxxer” propaganda.
It is highly likely that even if the seven subjects cogently explain why they have decided not to be injected with experimental concoctions, the BBC will edit out any and all valid points they make—and/or deny whatever evidence they cite. We can make these predictions with relative ease, simply by noting the extraordinary level of deceit already present in the BBC’s press release announcing its “programme.”
We can make still further forecasts about the BBC’s alleged “investigation.” For one thing, it won’t honestly report on the current status of the vaccine trials.
Namely, it will neglect to inform its audience that the NCT04368728 trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab isn’t finished. And it will not reveal that neither the NCT04470427 trial of Moderna’s mRNA jab nor Johnson & Johnson’s NCT04614948 Jansen trials have posted any results, because these trials, too, are incomplete. Moreover, the BBC will strenuously avoid pointing out the implication of these facts—probably by not reporting them.
Unless the recipients of these drugs were told that the jabs they were about to receive were experimental, they couldn’t possibly have given their informed consent. Consequently, whenever they weren’t informed, administration of the jab contravened nearly every known medical ethic, including those outlined in the Nuremberg Code. But the BBC won’t mention this, either.
It is also safe to say that the BBC will not tell its audience that AstraZeneca concluded the NCT04516746 trial of its AZD1222 adenovirus jab more than a year before schedule by not bothering to conduct a quality control review, rendering its so-called vaccine trial results practically meaningless.
The BBC will not tell anyone that the British Medical Journal (BMJ)disclosed that both Moderna and Jansen (J&J) confirmed that they had given the jabs to their placebo control groups, ending any prospect of their trials ever meeting the basic standards for randomised controlled studies. When the BMJ asked Pfizer if it had done the same, Pfizer declined comment.
Instead, the BBC will almost certainly claim that the jabs have been through extensive clinical trials. It will just omit the part about them having failed to properly complete any.
The BBC will not acknowledge the freedom of information requests and subsequent court ruling in the US that overturned the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to delay release of Pfizer’s primary safety monitoring data for 75 years. The Federal Court forced the FDA to release the damning results of Pfizer’s own early monitoring of adverse reactions following the jab rollout in the US and Europe.
In the space of just a couple of months, there were approximately 42,000 adverse reactions to the Pfizer mRNA jab alone, with just over 25,000 of those confirmed by medical exam and the other 16,000+ unconfirmed. Of these, more than 1,200 injuries resulted in death. More than 11,000 of the injured had not recovered from their serious adverse event at the time of reporting.
The BBC certainly won’t report the Israeli study, the results of which indicate that the Pfizer jab prompts a marked decline in male fertility.
Nor will the BBC mention that Pfizer’s own research shows that, contrary to all of Pfizer’s marketing claims, the corporation knew during the trial phase that the lipid nanoparticles used in its jabs found their way into the liver, adrenal glands and spleen and, in particular, accumulated in female recipients’ ovaries.
The BBC may well have to acknowledge the more-than-38,000 possible vaccine deaths reported to the US VAERS system, the 2,200 deaths reported in the UK and the 46,000 deaths recorded by the European Medicines Agency. Its “experts” will point out that there is no evidence that these deaths are caused by the vaccines and will say that the risk of the disease COVID-19 is far higher than any known risks from the COVID-19 jabs.
The BBC will almost certainly make extraordinary and extremely silly claims about how many lives the jabs have allegedly saved. Again these claims will be based upon nothing but baseless assumptions about what could have happened according to some spurious “predictive model.” Rather like claiming your anti-unicorn spray has stopped a million unicorns from grazing your lawn because you don’t have any unicorns in your garden.
As we have just discussed, the risks of harm from COVID-19 claimed by the government and its propaganda outlets—the BBC foremost—are so implausible they verge on absurd. Yet the BBC will not inform its audience that, to date, not one of the regulators has produced a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis for any of the jabs. So the inevitable BBC claims that the jab benefits outweigh the risks will literally be based upon nothing at all.
The BBC will not go anywhere near reporting the findings of a team of eminent German pathologists who performed autopsies on 40 corpses of people who died within two weeks of vaccination—and who identified the vaccine as the likely cause of death in one-third of the cases.
Nor will the BBC report statements like those from the UK regulator, the MHRA, that adverse reactions, including deaths, are significantly undereported, with just ten percent of serious reactions and between two percent and four percent of non-serious reactions recorded.
What the BBC will do instead is rely upon carefully cherry-picked scientific papers, a narrow band of selected “expert opinion,” speculative statistics and emotionally charged anecdotes to convince its audience that the seven victims of its hit piece, though well meaning, are all hopelessly deluded due to the scourge of online disinformation. It may well try to squeeze in reference to the proposed Online Safety Act and suggest that this government policy is essential to tackle the disinformation problem fabricated in its documentary.
Of course, if the BBC were serious about its professed wish to “fully explore this complex and deeply divisive debate,” it wouldn’t simply subject a group of ordinary men and women to a tirade of unchallenged claims from its hand-picked group of “experts.” If it really wanted to tackle the debate with any objectivity or journalistic integrity, it would also report the views of some of the many eminently qualified scientists and physicians who do question the COVID-19 narrative and the alleged safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
It would be genuinely interesting to see people like Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Arne Burkhardt explain some of their reservations. Perhaps other scientists, physicians and experts who have questioned the vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic could be heard.
Maybe the statistician and Nobel Laureate Professor Michael Levitt; epidemiologists like Professor John Ioannidis or Professor Knut Wittkowski; experts in clinical drug development such as Alexandra (Sasha) Latypova; or physicians such as Dr. Peter McCullough or Dr. Roger Hodkinson could be invited to challenge the BBC’s preferred experts.
The audience and the seven subjects of the BBC’s attack could then hear both sides of the argument. But that won’t happen.
Alas, many won’t get to see the BBC’s vaccine marketing programme because they have already decided that they will no longer pay for its propaganda to be beamed into their heads. These numbers are swelling all the time, hence the deceptive plan to allegedly end the BBC license fee while a desperate workaround is conjured up to make sure the BBC’s coffers remain stuffed with gargantuan amounts of public money.
Still, we might get to watch “Unvaccinated, with Professor Hannah Fry” when it finds its way on to Odysee, BitChute, Rumble or some other worthy video-sharing platform. If so, it will perhaps be interesting for some to see how accurate or inaccurate this article is.
In the meantime, let’s give the Beeb the benefit of the doubt and hope this post is way off the mark. Instead of the awful propagandist drivel we might expect, let’s hope the BBC proves that these suspicions are born of nothing but unfounded, anti-BBC bias.
Deputy head of Russia’s mission to the UN Dmitry Polyansky has criticized the Western media for its unwillingness to condemn the shelling of a maternity hospital in Donetsk by Ukraine.
“Where is Western media reaction?” Polyansky asked in a tweet on Tuesday. “All those BBC, Reuters, AFP, who were shouting about damage to [a] maternity hospital in Mariupol used by Ukrainian nationalists as a firing position?”
Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) officials reported that Kiev’s forces recently stepped up their indiscriminate shelling of Donetsk. On Monday, five people were killed and almost 40 others injured as several areas of the city, including a market, came under fire.
At least one of the shells hit a maternity hospital, damaging the building and shattering its windows. Fatalities and injuries were avoided due to the fact that patients and staff had taken shelter in the basement, according to DPR officials.
“Ukraine is deliberately targeting civilians. Will we hear a word of condemnation?” the Russian diplomat wrote.
He also shared a video of a reporter showing the damage done to the maternity hospital and patients hiding in the basement.
In an earlier tweet, Polyansky stressed that there were no military units in the areas that Ukraine shelled. “The West is fully responsible for these crimes” as Donetsk is being struck with NATO shells that were recently provided to Kiev by its foreign backers, he wrote.
Ukraine’s attack on the maternity hospital in Donetsk has been largely ignored by the Western media, but Reuters did dedicate a few lines to the incident in its report on Monday.
“Russian news agencies later reported that a shell had fallen on a maternity hospital in the city of Donetsk, triggering a fire and prompting staff to send patients into the basement. There was no independent confirmation of any of the attacks and Reuters could not ascertain whether they had taken place,” the agency wrote.
However, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Russia struck a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9, the story made headlines in most major Western media outlets. Three people, including a child, were killed in the incident, local authorities said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has denied targeting the medical facility at all, suggesting the whole thing had been staged by the Ukrainians, who detonated explosives on the ground. The authenticity of the photos presented by Kiev as proof of the claimed Russian attack has also been questioned by many online.
Marianna Vyshemirskaya, one of the pregnant women featured in the images that appeared on the front pages of many major outlets, later claimed that there had been no Russian airstrike on the hospital. She insisted that she told AP journalists about it, but they decided not to mention it in their reporting.
Vyshemirskaya, who was evacuated to the DPR from Mariupol and has since become a mother, also said her photos had been distributed without her consent.
THE BBC has been accused of institutional alarmism about climate change in a report published by Net Zero Watch. It reveals the BBC’s persistent exaggeration and false information when it comes to climate and weather-related news.
The study, written by me, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen items of false claims and fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving complaints in recent years.
It shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.
Persistent misrepresentation by BBC journalists in climate news coverage is fuelling the corporation’s institutional alarmism.
Institutional alarmism is a form of hyped and exaggerated news reporting that is deeply embedded in the BBC. It manifests itself as unbalanced, one-sided coverage of climate risks that go uncorrected by the BBC’s in-house fact checkers.
In 2020, the BBC’s director general warned that the problem posed by disinformation online was increasingly serious and that the BBC would need to work harder than ever to expose fake news and separate fact from fiction.
Since then the corporation has set up a team of fact checkers, a BBC-wide Anti-Disinformation Unit and a Climate Misinformation team. Yet none of these teams of fact checkers noticed or addressed the long list of false news stories that were corrected by the BBC only after lengthy and protracted complaint procedures.
The dossier includes the following examples of fake news:
• The three complaints upheld last year against the BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, two of which concerned a Panorama episode devoted to global warming;
• Claims that the number of floods around the world has increased 15-fold since 2005;
• A BBC News report that the population of African penguins was declining rapidly because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that new onshore wind farms were ‘banned’ in the UK;
• False statements about ‘record’ temperatures;
• A BBC Two broadcast, which wrongly alleged that the reindeer population in Russia was declining because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that hurricanes were becoming more frequent and powerful;
• A World at One broadcast which asserted that sea levels in Miami were rising at ten times the global rate.
Most of the claims were so obviously and ridiculously false that it is hard to see how they made it through the BBC’s editorial process. This of course raises further questions. Is the BBC so entrenched in its own version of climate change that it believes its own propaganda, just as the Soviets did? Or do the editors and various layers of management simply not care whatever lies are published?
The above list is merely the tip of the iceberg. Many other falsehoods occur without being challenged, or where complaints are simply ignored, such as news items about how weather is getting more extreme, Victoria Falls drying up, droughts in California, starving polar bears and many more. One BBC News report baldly stated that the number of weather disasters had increased five-fold in the last 50 years – a patently absurd claim, which the organisation responsible for the database explains is actually due to better data reporting.
One of the most egregious examples of bias came in Sir David Attenborough’s documentary three years ago, Climate Change – The Facts. Despite the title, the hour-long programme had little to do with facts, more to do with propaganda. It made several highly questionable assertions, such as that ‘storms, floods, heatwaves and sea level rise are all getting rapidly worse as a result of climate change’. The documentary provided no data to back up these claims, nor did it offer the views of scientific experts who do not agree.
Often BBC reports are just outright propaganda, with the opinions of Greenpeace, WWF and the Green Party being given prominence but with very little mention of alternative views. Last year’s coverage of the proposed Cumbria coal mine by Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Environmental Analyst, was a classic example of this.
At other times, the reporting is just silly. For instance, last summer the BBC gave prominent coverage to a report which claimed that the impact of global warming was likely to lead to ‘impaired’ performances at the Tokyo Olympics. This flew in the face of the fact that many Olympics in recent years have taken place in much hotter climes, such as Los Angeles, Atlanta and Athens.
The sheer weight of evidence presented in this paper suggests that bias is now endemic in the BBC’s climate reporting. All the factual errors noted could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. Is this carried out and the results ignored if they don’t agree with the BBC’s agenda? Or is the corporation’s output just made up and printed anyway without checks? Either way, this is journalism at its shoddy worst. Who is editing this fake reporting? Why are they not insisting on accurate reporting? Where are the highly paid executives who let all of this continue?
The topic of climate change, Net Zero and the total transformation of society which is demanded to achieve it is of crucial importance for the future of the country. The public deserve all the facts, not just the warped version offered by the BBC.
You can read the report, ‘Institutional alarmism – the BBC’s disastrous climate complaints’,here.
Ukraine: The Disinformation War was the title of the latest piece of disinformation the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) showcased to support Britain’s Ukrainian war and to suppress dissent on its home front.
Radio 4’s hit piece was a personalized attack on a number of British-based academics, who had been recently named and shamed in the British House of Commons for not being sufficiently Russophobic; the House of Commons is the lower house of the British Parliament; it is where Wee Joe Devlin, a member for Belfast, was beaten within an inch of his life by his fellow MPs for denouncing British war crimes in Ireland as more of his fellow MPs called for him to be summarily murdered. As several MPs have recently been convicted of child sex rape charges and more are facing trial for sexually assaulting their fellow MPs, its pronouncements should be discounted accordingly.
As, of course should those of the BBC for reasons adumbrated below and for others which Justin Schlosberg, Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward outlined in their tweets following this further attack on them by the BBC and its dark allies.
In its pretenses to impartiality, the BBC claim that these academics are so “driven by a conviction that Western governments are responsible for many of the world’s ills” that they “have shared misinformation in their attempts to raise questions about the official narrative of the war” leading “their detractors [to] say they are useful to Vladimir Putin” and for the academics to counter claim “there’s a McCarthyist witch hunt against them”.
Within that pre-cut British imperialist box, a few carefully edited soundbites from Schlosberg and their other targets, as well as a deluge of disinformation from their targets’ students and critics comprise this BBC kangaroo court by radio.
J’accuse
Hayward’s primary crime seems to be he mentioned a contentious 2018 chemical gas attack in Syria to opine that there are at least two versions to what actually happened. For the record and for reasons I address below, I believe all such attacks were orchestrated by the Syrian rebels, aided and abetted by the BBC and MI5. Hayward, importantly, is not that forthright. He believes, on the evidence in front of his nose, and as one who writes academic articles on disinformation, that further inquiries are needed to fully unmask the real culprits, whoever they may be, of the 2018 Douma and 2022 Bucha attacks. Hayward is, in essence, agnostic as, perhaps, academics and the BBC should be.
With regards to the Bucha atrocities, which I addressed in an earlier article, and which the BBC is using to attack Hayward et al, though a full investigation is likewise needed into unmasking those culprits, the British regime have vetoed such a call in the UN. But, as such an investigation must be impartial to be worthwhile, that would, of course, exclude the BBC and those they use to fatten out hit pieces like this.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
In their efforts to discredit Hayward et al, the BBC interviews James Roscoe, Britain’s UN Ambassador, who dutifully trots out the British government’s line on Bucha.
Nader Hashemi, an American itinerant academic with no Syrian connections, is wheeled out to say how horrified he is that Hayward can mention the Douma attack, “a border line genocide”, in passing and how concerned he is that Hayward’s fleeting mention of the Douma war crime might be putting young minds at risk.
Kvitka Perehinets, one of Hayward’s Ukrainian students, is wheeled out to tell the BBC’s worldwide audience, as she has already told Hayward’s academic bosses, that Hayward should be silenced. Although Perehinets’ family are currently fighting Russian speakers in Ukraine’s East, Perehinets does not make it clear if Hayward should be dispatched with a bullet to his head or simply disgraced by being strapped to a lamp post as he undoubtedly would be in government held Ukraine.
Pride of place in the written version of the BBC’s hit piece went to Hayward critic Mariangela Alejandro, a young, purple haired Mexican student with a nose ring, a baby’s dummy around her neck and a cute purple amethyst ring on her marriage finger. Mariangela informs us that she had heard Hayward was a good lecturer but that, shortly into his course. things started to get “weird” as “he goes from talking about global financial markets [and] poverty, into this realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
Although one of my earlier articles debunked the conspiracy theory canard specifically for instances like this, the very short clip the Radio 4’s hit piece played suggests mentioning it may have been germane to Hayward’s lecture. If, as Mariangela alleges, Hayward’s lectures were the disjointed ramblings of a conspiracy theorist (sic), then that would have been picked up by the student evaluation forms and conveyed to the university’s top brass through the students’ class rep and the Students’ Union. Even if, as I doubt, Mariangela was the class rep, it was not her place to broadcast her criticisms to the BBC and thence to the world.
Send In the Clowns
Hayward is a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, whose affiliates include a number of mercenary fringe thinkers, as well as the afore mentioned Piers Robinson, who has now gone on to greater things. I mention Robinson here as the BBC made no effort to discover what has become of him, even though a 60 second Internet trawl would have solved that conundrum, to Robinson’s credit.
Because there is war is afoot, all sides will have their mercenaries and their idiots, useful or otherwise. That NATO, in President Putin’s own words, is infinitely better resourced than is Russia, it stands to reason that NATO has more brown envelopes to push the BBC’s way than do opposing or neutral outlets. That is not to say that every NATO journalist or blogger is a media whore. Far from it.
Justin Schlosberg, one of those the BBC hatcheted, was attacked for citing Patrick Lancaster, an American citizen journalist embedded on the Russian side of Ukraine’s lines. But, as Schlosberg’s tweets as well as my earlier article on citizen journalists, which explicitly mentioned Lancaster, make plain, Lancaster’s work only helps us to ascertain if there is anything to be seen that warrants further investigation if, in those immortal words, anyone had been raped and speaks English. Beyond that, Lancaster is irrelevant.
Though Lancaster is not the hill academics like Schlosberg should be crucified on, it is crucial to note that the BBC and other NATO outlets repeatedly used the work of the White Helmets and related terror groups in Syria. Because the BBC, as Robert Stuart’s sterling work clearly shows, not only used their footage but were deeply embedded with the White Helmets, ISIS and other terrorists, they are in no position to cast vitriol at Lancaster or at Schlosberg for mentioning Lancaster, almost in passing.
NATO, in any case, has its own cast of clowns, amongst the most elevated of whom is Scott Lucas, who was an American professor of American Studies at Birmingham University in England, with ties to the Toran Research Center, which has major links with Turkish Intelligence and with supposedly demobbed Syrian terrorists. Lucas regularly appears on the mainstream media, holding forth on Syria and other issues he has no expertise on.
Prominent journalist Peter Hitchens noted that, when he phoned up Lucas to discuss Lucas’ uninformed comments on the White Helmets’ murder gang, Lucas hung up on him. Though Lucas is a NATO lightweight, Hitchens is noteworthy as the BBC were forced to apologize to him over their coverage of NATO’s 2018 Douma chemical gas attack and to confess that Chloe Hadjimatheou, who ran that piece and who also did the Hayward/Schlosberg hit piece we are now discussing “failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims”. Hadjimatheou, in other words, has long been guilty of the same misinformation offenses she tries to concoct against Hayward et al. This, remember, is the same NATO media that swore black and blue that Tom Mac Master, a bearded American academic in Scotland, was a Syrian lesbian being oppressed by “Assad” in Damascus where, like Lucas and Hashemi, MacMaster had never been in his life.
Then we have bottom feeder Eliot “Suck my Bellingcat Balls” Higgins, whom the Atlantic Council, the BBC and affiliated NATO front groups built into a citizen expert on all things military to justify their predetermined anti Syrian and anti Russian NATO narratives. Given that Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, could not even hack the easiest course at Britain’s easiest university, the only explanation as to why MI6 and allied media outlets and intelligence agencies push Bellingcat, Bana and others to prominence is to dumb down debate to the level of babbling infants so that no one worth their salt would bother getting involved in trying to stop NATO’s war crimes. The BBC hit piece on Hayward et al is a part of that process.
This link fillets Higgins’ foolish pronouncements on the Ghouta false flag chemical attack. Dr Neal Krawetz has slammed Higgins’ et al’s use of his image identifying software, and he has called them idiots not worth spending time on. But Profs Postol and Krawetz are, like Hayward et al, forced to waste their very valuable time clinically ticking off these useless idiots, who have no relevant experience or knowledge to promote or defend the White Helmets terror gang, but who are widely cited in the BBC and similar pro-war Western mainstream media to do just that.
Nader Hashemi, the American itinerant academic, who speaks about a Syrian “border line genocide” falls into the same useful NATO idiot camp. And so too does the odious Oliver Kamm, who took a day off from running his years-long clandestine vendetta against Neil Clark and getting Philip Cross to edit Wikipedia pages he disapproves of to weigh in on this latest BBC smear piece.
Muslim Brotherhood Royalty
Tim Hayward could do worse than to get his students to survey Robert Stuart’s sterling work, which is a damning indictment of the BBC’s misinformation. Central to Stuart’s work is Dr Rola Hallam who, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s al Kurdi family ,was the BBC’s fixer in ISIS controlled Syria.
Dr Rola Hallam is the daughter of Mousa al Kurdi, one of the head honchos in the supposedly moderate wing of Syria’s Murder Inc who was finding evidence of chemical gas attacks wherever this clown chanced to look. During BBC Panorama’s farcical show, Rola, her BBC crew and her Hand in Hand for Syria stooges (who threatened to sue me and much more) sailed unimpeded through ISIS checkpoints. Hallam/Kurdi landed the lead role in that state controlled BBC farce. The BBC’s collusion with ISIS, as evidenced by their ability to sail through ISIS checkpoints and to work in ISIS strongholds, may be a further indication that the moderate and less moderate wings of Syria’s Murder Inc, just like the moderate and Nazi contingents of Zelensky’s junta, are in bed together and that the BBC should not pretend otherwise. Something there for Hayward and his purple haired students to chew over.
Ukraine to UK Universities
Although the attacks on Hayward et al could be viewed as a BBC storm in an academic tea cup, it is part of a much wider MI5 orchestrated campaign to kill the Western mind. Olexsandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute has declared that 100 million books, including all Russian classics, must be removed from circulation. These would come from “various genres, including children’s books, and love novels, and detective stories”. Although Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring would perchance call me a conspiracy theorist (sic) for my past defense of Masha and Mishka, there is much to learn in those lovely tales, just as there was in Soviet film, at least according to Hollywood’s own Martin Scorcese, who acknowledged Hollywood’s debt to Soviet director, montage inventor and pioneer film theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who is best known for his seminal 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin.
But Zelensky’s Nazis will have none of that and nor apparently will their compromized BBC apologists, whose warped minds think that there is something unclean about Masha and Mishka for no other reason than they are the creations of Russian geniuses. If Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring wishes to understand what drives war crimes in Chiapas, as much as in Douma or Donbas, she might begin by looking at how everything Syrian and Russian is being marginalized, just as Mexico’s elite marginalized and murdered the Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Ch’ols, Tojolabals, Zoques, Lacandons, Mochós and Mams of Chapas.
As for Kvitka Perehinets, the young Ukrainian student, whose family are fighting Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as she is at a university, she might like to read some of the 100 million books Olexsandra Koval wants to torch. She could, of course, try talking to a Russian student but Russian students now, being Russian, are haram. As for the rest of us, though we must continue to call hate groups like NATO and their BBC mouthpieces to account for the sake not only of academics like Hayward who try to call them to account but even more so for the sake of young minds like those of Alejandro and Perehinets they warp and even much more so because of those unsung youngsters who die in Douma, Damascus and Donbas as a result of the BBC’s misinformation toxins.
It seems the nefarious Inquisition in Europe, which brutally sought to rid the world of heresy and political rivalry for centuries, has reignited as its new protagonists in the British national broadcaster BBC strive to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints held by academics.
In a new documentary on BBC Radio 4’s Facts on File, and also in a report based on the documentary by the BBC News, two academics, namely Tim Hayward and Justin Schlosberg, have been falsely accused of supporting and spreading “Russian propaganda” and “misinformation” about Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine that began on February 24, either through their lectures or on Twitter.
Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, had re-tweeted a representative of Russia to the United Nations, who stated that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9 was “fake news.”
“As long as we’re still able to hear two sides of the story we should continue striving to do so,” Hayward said.
While the West condemned Russia for targeting the hospital several times with airstrikes, the Russian foreign ministry strongly rejected the allegation, branding it as “information terrorism” against Moscow.
A few days later and in the House of Commons, legislator Robert Halfon from the Conservative Party denounced Hayward and also Dr. Tara McCormack, a lecturer in international politics at the University of Leicester, who had spoken about “ludicrous disinformation” of both Kiev and Moscow.
Halfon also urged the parliament to “contact these universities directly to stop them acting as useful idiots for” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi at the same session of the House of Commons described the said academics and the like as people who are “buying” Moscow’s “false narrative” about the war in Ukraine.
“It is a false and dangerous narrative and we will crack down on it hard,” Zahawi said.
The BBC quotes 21-year-old history and politics student Mariangela Alejandro as saying that things in Hayward’s class got “weird” when the professor stepped in the “realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
The British broadcaster even criticized, though implicitly, Hayward for a lecture in which he outlined an argument that the West-backed White Helmets group might have helped fake a chemical attack in Syria years ago. Russia and the Syrian government have stressed that the attack was “staged.”
The White Helmets group, which claims to be a humanitarian NGO, is known for its coordination with terror outfits in Syria to carry out staged chemical attacks in order to falsely incriminate Syrian government forces and fabricate pretexts for military strikes by a US-led military coalition present in Syria since 2014.
On April 14, 2018, the US, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers northeast of the capital Damascus.
That alleged attack was reported by the White Helmets group, which published videos showing them purportedly treating survivors. Washington and its allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, an allegation strongly rejected by the Syrian government.
Hayward used an argument put forward by members of a collective of academics and bloggers he is a member of, known as the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and the Media (WGSPM).
“One narrative says the White Helmets helped rescue victims, provided evidence and gave witness statements about the chemical attack on Douma on 7 April 2018,” Hayward said during the lecture.
However, he added that “the critics say the White Helmets were responsible for staging a false flag event to spur the West to attack the Syrian government. In fact, dispute about this case is still current.”
Hayward told the BBC that he does not teach about Syria, but simply used an example in his class that he was familiar with.
The BBC, however, seems to be eager to lash out at Hayward when it quoted Dr Nader Hashemi, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, as describing Hayward’s argument about the White Helmets and the staged chemical attack as “a deeply distorted set of teachings.”
Regarding Hayward’s stance on the purported Russian airstrikes against a maternity hospital in Mariupol that says “we should strive to hear both sides”, the BBC drew in Kvitka Perehinets, a Ukrainian student at the University of Edinburgh, who said “there are no two sides” to the conflict and that “The oppressor – in this case, Russia – should not be given the same kind of platform as those who are being oppressed.”
Although the University of Edinburgh claims that its programs are approved by a board of studies, emphasizing its commitment to “academic freedom”, it also stresses that it takes “a strong view… against the spread of misinformation” and encourages students to report concerns.
The university should be notified that one of the primary jobs of “academic freedom” is paving the way for academic research to distinguish true information from “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
However, the UK’s Department for Education (DfE), which is responsible for education in England, inquisitively controls the flow of research in universities, saying it expected “universities’ due diligence processes to consider the reputational, ethical and security risks of false and dangerous narratives, and ensure that students are not misled by views that are clearly false.”
When the academics’ tweets were raised in the Commons, Zahawi said the minister for Higher and Further Education, Michelle Donelan, was “contacting those universities”, a means of pressure on Hayward and the like who think differently from the mainstream in the West.
Another academic pressured by the BBC and the Education system in the UK is professor Schlosberg, who specializes in media and journalism at Birkbeck, University of London.
He has been lambasted for re-tweeting Russian state media questioning what occurred in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, 37 kilometers northwest of the capital Kiev.
Back on April 2, the mayor of Bucha in a video message claimed that 300 people had been killed by the Russian army with some appearing to have been bound by their hands and feet before being shot.
He also presented footage and photographs showing the dead bodies of those allegedly killed or executed by Russian troops, claiming that 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves while nearly 10 others were either unburied or only partially covered by earth. Later on, Kiev claimed a death toll of more than 1000 in the city.
A day later, the Ukrainian government urged major Western powers, including the United States, to impose crippling fresh sanctions on Moscow over what it called a “massacre” in Bucha, a newly liberated town at the time.
The Kremlin strongly rejected any involvement of Russian troops in the so-called massacre, with Russian President Sergei Lavrov stressing that the killings did not occur while Russian soldiers were in the city.
He added that the so-called dead bodies in footage circulating the internet were “staged” and the images of them plus Ukraine’s false version of events had been spread on social media by Kiev and Western countries.
On April 4, Schlosberg tweeted that “Russian troops left on 30th March. No mention of any ‘massacre’ or bodies lining the streets for 4 days.” He also re-tweeted a video of Bucha’s mayor speaking without mentioning a massacre.
The BBC, however, hurriedly stressed in its report that Russian media has been using the video to bolster the idea that the bodies appeared after the Russians had left the city.
It quoted the academic as saying that he had “no idea” regarding what really happened there.
“My only understanding is that I think no-one else really knows what happened. I think there is a very strong likelihood that there were very serious atrocities, almost certainly the vast majority of which were committed by Russia,” Schlosberg further told the BBC.
However, in a string of tweets on Wednesday, he denounced the broadcaster’s “grossly defamatory allegation.”
“Rather than engage with the actual meaning of my tweets, the BBC chose to uncritically endorse obvious manipulation by people who have been actively trying to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints since the start of” the current operation by Russia in Ukraine, Schlosberg said.
“The manner in which the program achieved this was so cynical and unguarded it beggars belief, even for those of us increasingly skeptical about the BBC’s commitment to basic journalistic standards, let alone its own lofty public service values,” he stressed.
Guess which article was written by a BBC journalist:
One statement… claims: “We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.” While that may (or may not) be true, the next sentence is spuriously precise: “Every hour three species disappear. Every day up to 150 species are lost’”… The International Union for Conservation in Nature (IUCN) has listed 801 animals and plant species (mostly animal) known to have gone extinct since 1500. But if it is really true that up to 150 species are being lost every day, shouldn’t we expect to be able to name more than 801 extinct species in 512 years.
…
Nearly one third of all species are now endangered due to human activities… the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see… more than 142,000 species have been assessed [by the IUCN] and 29% are considered endangered, which means they have a very high risk of extinction… it is hoped that an agreement can be reached to stop what scientists are calling the ‘sixth mass extinction’ event.
Correct, whichever one you chose – both articles were produced by BBC writers. But what a difference a decade makes. The first quote came from an article written in April 2012, while the second appeared a few days ago. The first article by Richard Knight reports the statement about a great wave of extinction. But it correctly shows it as a claim, and the author then goes on to examine whether it has any validity. The evidence suggests that it does not.
The second article, from Esme Stallard, takes a different tack. The now-familiar klaxon of ecological Armageddon is sounded, with hair-raising claims simply repeated without any attempt made to question them. The claim that species are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times quicker is linked to a blog called Global Forest Watch. The extinction quote on the first page of the blog does not attribute it to scientists – that appears to be the addition of Stallard. Far from querying the figures, it seems an attempt is made to give them added provenance.
Meanwhile, the idea that we are suffering a sixth mass extinction is little more than the invention of climate activists, led in this case by agitprop operations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The claim certainly isn’t backed up by dead bodies. The mass extinction scare was debunked about five years ago, at a time when it was starting to gain popular traction, by the Smithsonian palaeontologist Doug Erwin, who dismissed it as junk science. Erwin is one of the leading experts on the End-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago. “Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he said. He went on to note that people who claim we are in a sixth mass extinction do not understand the logical flaw in their arguments. It is a “way of frightening people” since if it was actually true, “then there’s no point in conservation biology”.
The number of widespread, durably skeletonised marine species that have gone extinct, notes Erwin, is close to zero.
So how did the BBC, and most other mainstream media, move so quickly from a ‘mission to explain’ to outright green activism and, by default, the promotion of the political control-and-command Net Zero project? As with the Covid experience, we see a marked recent shift in the acceptance of alarmist official messaging and, hand-in-hand, a push for even harsher enforcement measures for the political agenda of the day. ‘Follow the science’ seems only to apply to the work of approved scientists. Social media companies are only too happy to go along with restrictions on permissible speech, while opponents are routinely traduced with terms such as covidiots, anti-vaxxers and climate deniers.
To your correspondent’s way of thinking, the true climate denial lies with the acceptance that the science is settled. Green alarmism has a long and continuing history of failed predictions, but the activists struck gold in the 1980s and 90s when temperatures rose after a fall from the 1940s. Global cooling was quickly substituted by global warming. It had a good run, but the writing was on the wall when the temperature stopped rising from around 1998 to 2010. And the slowdown continues with a current pause lasting another 91 months. Surface datasets can be adjusted, in many cases quietly upwards by 30%, pauses massaged away and record hot years proclaimed, but the jig is looking up. Bad weather can be rebranded as ‘extreme’, and mass extinctions declared to be underway, but their value is limited over time since the claims are easily debunked.
But the show can be kept on the road if the science surrounding carbon dioxide and its precise warming effect in the atmosphere is deemed settled and beyond dispute or debate. Despite 50 years of scientific work, nobody knows what happens to the global temperature if the levels of CO2 double in the atmosphere. Wild guesses that temperatures will rise by 6°C are fed into climate models, which use the politically correct data to produce constantly wrong forecasts. Many scientists suggest natural variations are far more important in determining climate, but their views are ruthlessly ignored under the ‘settled science’ mantra. Again, we see something similar over Covid. Despite being signed by many eminent medics, the lockdown sceptical Great Barrington Declaration was widely ignored in the mainstream media.
The BBC started to shutdown climate science debate early in 2006 when an internal conference, partly led by the environment analyst Roger Harrabin, attempted to redefine the editorial balance between competing scientific hypotheses. Natural forces were to be downplayed in favour of the unproven suggestion that warming is caused mostly by humans burning fossil fuel. This, despite the fact that it is generally known that humans only produce 4% of all CO2 that enters the atmosphere every year. The editorial rot started slowly at first – we can see that in 2012, work was still being published that questioned some of the extreme environmental claims being made. But by 2018, the Director of News and Current Affairs Fran Unsworth demanded that interviewees sceptical about man-made climate change “were no longer to be invited regularly”. In fact, we can read that as never.
Ten years ago the BBC was still questioning exaggerated or false climate claims. These days it is making them. As I noted on Wednesday, Justin Rowlatt claimed in his “Wild Weather” programme that deaths from warmer global weather were rising. In fact they are falling. His Panorama producer justified the statement on the grounds the deaths were “cumulative” – as though a running total of deaths would ever go down.
No need for an increase in the licence fee, then. The BBC’s income is always going up, cumulatively.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor
Fresh insights into the techniques used by the BBC to catastrophise climate change are revealed in an exchange of letters with the producer of Justin Rowlatt’s “Wild Weather” Panorama and a former producer of Top Gear. Justifying the Rowlatt suggestion that global weather is getting warmer and more unpredictable and the death toll is rising, the programme’s producer Leo Telling said the latter figure was “cumulative”. In reply, Ken Pollock called the explanation “asinine”, and suggested Telling recognised that: “The death toll in the U.K. is cumulative. It is difficult to imagine it not increasing, if you quote cumulative figures,” he explained.
The “Wild Weather” programme, broadcast in December 2020, was an emotion-charged rant that tried to show that human-caused climate change was behind a series of recent bad weather events. It led to two internal complaints being upheld against Rowlatt. On the death toll claim, the BBC accepted that deaths from natural disasters have actually been falling for many years.
Telling then went on to argue that heatwaves will lead to excess deaths in vulnerable groups with a lower tolerance to extreme temperatures. In addition, he stated that the heatwaves will lead to avoidable deaths through wildfires.
“How can you write with a straight face that heatwaves will kill more and more people,” replied Pollock, “without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”
How do you reconcile the fact that Singapore and Helsinki have average temperatures differing by 22°C, and yet you accept that a further 1°C could spell disaster, he went on to ask.
Pollock then wondered what the Panorama producer really meant by the suggestion that avoidable wildfire deaths would increase. “You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,” he wrote.
In Pollock’s view, much of what Telling produced was drawn from the World Health Organisation and “highly questionable” IPCC predictions. One might expect you to challenge some of them, or at least refer to the source and the speculative nature of the predictions, he contended. Pollock concluded by noting that in his 22 years as a BBC producer, he became alarmed at the inadequate use of statistics by the Corporation in current affairs and elsewhere: “Many BBC people repeated statistics without understanding them”.
On the BBC climate desk, repeating, seemingly without question, the catastrophe claims from third party sources is a normal method of operation. In February 2019, the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reported the view of Left wing think tank IPPR that “human impacts had reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy”. No attempt was made to examine these extravagant opinions. It later transpired that the report, which contained numerous false extreme weather claims, was part written by a young woman whose previous employment had been working as a volunteer for an Edinburgh ‘equality’ charity. Meanwhile, Matt McGrath, the first winner of the BBVA Foundation €100,000 award for climate journalism, wrote an article in July 2019 titled “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Accepting his award from BBVA, a Spanish bank with large green investments, McGrath defended the primacy of specialist journalism “that draws on sound scientific sources” in an era of fake news.
Barely a week goes by without the Net Zero-inspired fantasies of climate Armageddon being publicised from the work of academics, think tanks, meteorological operations like the Met Office and the IPCC. This latter body, heavily dependent on climate models and their to-date wildly inaccurate forecasts, is held in particularly high esteem. Writing in July last year, Harrabin looked forward to a new edition by stating, “computing will underpin the new climate science ‘Bible’ from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) next month”.
It might be suggested that an editorial emergency is awaiting the BBC in the near future. Most of its climate reporting seems to be little more than repeating bad (“extreme”) weather events, and claiming the climate is, somehow, breaking down. In reality, global warming has run out of steam with pauses and dips common in the record over the last two decades. The accurate temperature news from satellites is largely ignored, and there is little appetite for investigating how the major global surface datasets have quietly adjusted their records to add an extra 30% of heating over the last 20 years. Most of the bad weather claims are easily debunked, and are unlikely to be so well tolerated by the wider public if Net Zero leads to substantial reductions in personal freedoms, income and diet.
Writing an excoriating report on the “Wild Weather” programme, Ross Clark noted recently in the Daily Mail that there was a time when the BBC was committed to presenting both sides of the argument. He noted a 2018 instruction sent by the former BBC director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, demanding that “interviewees who were sceptical about man-made climate change were no longer to be invited regularly”. He concluded: “Unsworth’s instructions had clearly become the status quo.”
Last September, Insulate Britain activist Zoe Cohen told the BBC that climate change would lead to “the loss of all we cherish, our society, our way of life, law and order”. Ross noted that it was a hysterical claim that had no foundation in science, yet she remained unchallenged. Some at the BBC, he went on to suggest, were losing patience with their climate editor. “The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,” an unnamed BBC source is reported to have told another newspaper. “These are not mistakes; he’s a campaigner.”
Matt McGrath is another who might care to look into some of the sources that feed his doomsday copy. Around the time of receiving his BBVA present, he published a story claiming that over 11,000 scientists were predicting “untold suffering” from the forthcoming climate emergency. Among those signatories promoting a “clear and unequivocal emergency” were Professor Mickey Mouse and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
The perfect BBC climate breakdown story. Making it up, in a world of make believe.
You may remember how from early on in the Covid vaccine roll-out the former Pfizer chief Mike Yeadon, as part of his many warnings against the new gene ‘vaccines’, strongly advised against jabbing pregnant women. Not only had there been no pre-clinical reproductive toxicology testing but research on rats showed that the vaccine accumulated in the ovaries. Needless to say the BBC was first out of the traps to dismiss fears that the vaccines could harm fertility or cause miscarriages, and to target Yeadon personally. It put out a special propaganda (News) ‘reality check’ report claiming that the study showing the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries was ‘false’.
Will there be any retraction or apology now senior obstetricians are putting their heads above the parapet to report on what they have been seeing amongst their patients?
Dr James Thorp is one such, an extensively published 68-year-old US specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology as well as maternal-foetal medicine, who has practised for more than 42 years. He told Epoch Times that he sees 6,000 to 7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year and that many complications among them are due to the Covid vaccines.
‘I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in foetuses, in children, offspring, foetal death, miscarriage, death of the foetus inside the mom,’ he said, adding that what he has seen in the last two years is unprecedented.
Thorp goes on to explain that although he has seen a visible increase in foetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with the Covid-19 vaccination, attempts to quantify them ‘are hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses’ imposed in September 2021.
You can see the full article here – it is well worth reading.
The tragedy is, as Mike Yeadon comments in the article, that ‘adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable’. They were, and he did his best to warn us of them, but all the BBC was interested in was discrediting him.
To remind the BBC, this is what he said then, to a Truth for Health Foundation conference, about the special dangers to women of child-bearing age from the gene-based vaccines, as reported by Neville Hodgkinson.
‘We’re being lied to . . . The authorities are not giving us full information about the risks of these products . . . The first is that we never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women. The thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s and 60s, in which a new product for morning sickness gave rise to at least 10,000 birth malformations, taught us that babies are not safe and protected inside the uterus, which is what we used to think. Interference by a chemical or something else at a critical stage of development could lead to irreparable damage.
‘Our government is urging pregnant women and women of childbearing age to get vaccinated, and they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie, because those studies have simply not been done. Reproductive toxicology has not been undertaken with any of these products, certainly not a full battery of tests that you would want.
‘That’s bad enough. Because it tells me there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens. But it’s much worse than that.’
Yeadon said he had seen a copy of the biodistribution report obtained from the Japanese regulator. To his horror, he said, ‘what we find is the vaccine doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope. It concentrates in the ovaries of rats, at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles. And a general rule of thumb in toxicology is: if you don’t have any data to contradict what you’ve learned [from the animal studies], that’s the assumption you make for humans.
‘So my assumption at the moment is that these vaccines are concentrating in the ovaries of every female who has been given them. We don’t know what that will do, but it cannot be benign and it could be seriously harmful.’
His third concern, shared by a German doctor in a petition to the European Medicines Agency eight months ago, is that the spike protein produced by the vaccine ‘is faintly similar – not very strongly – to an essential protein in your placenta, something that’s absolutely required for both fertilisation and formation and maintenance of the placenta’.
The worry was that an immune response to the spike protein might cause antibodies to bind to the placental protein as well.
There was more. He concluded: ‘I think you can only expect that that is happening in every woman of childbearing potential. What the effect will be, we can’t be certain, but it can’t be benign.
‘So I’m here to warn you that if you are of child-bearing potential or younger, so not at menopause, I would strongly recommend you do not accept these vaccines.’
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
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