Keep Bashing That Beeb!

While some in and around the Fourth Estate go after any paper that looks remotely left of centre in pursuit of revenge for the downfall of the House of Murdoch, most of the ire is directed at the BBC, an organisation that has suddenly, if some of the hyperbole is to be believed, become so awesomely powerful that it is endangering the very fabric of society.

This must be true because ConHome’s Tim Montgomerie says so in the Maily Telegraph. Monty has a problem with the Beeb: it doesn’t serve up the news he wants, in the way he wants it, or as he puts it, “misses the bigger picture”. He also wheels out his tired assertion that BBC staff, on their Facebook pages, are eleven times more likely to describe themselves as “liberal” rather “conservative”.

This smear depends on using the Stateside interpretation of “liberal”, and whether the Beeb staffers whose Facebook pages are being pored over substitute “left” for “liberal” is not told – because it has been assumed, so as to fit the exercise. He also delivers a howler when asserting that “other organisations could do the same [as the BBC] if they had the same income”. Like BSkyB, whose income is far larger, then?

But Monty is just one prong of the assault on the Beeb, with a second front having been opened up over Steve Jones’ report for the Corporation on their science coverage. This has produced the suggestion that the climate change denial lobby should not be treated as an equal to the scientific mainstream, and the usual suspects are not happy.

Christopher Booker is suitably indignant: after his usual telling of “statistical manipulation based on flawed data”, he protests about Jones’ use of pejorative language, while slipping in the occasional “warmist”, and accusing any scientist he mentions of not knowing what they are talking about, because their specialism is not to his taste (Booker read History at Cambridge). Some background on Booker and his tendency to spread misinformation can be read HERE.

But the most over-the-top Beeb bashing piece comes from David Rose (who has previous on this subject) in the Mail. After suggesting that Steve Jones is in hock to the BBC, Rose also talks of “warmist orthodoxy”, then pulls a whopper of some substance with the assertion that “the world temperature trend since 1995 has been flat, with no evidence of warming at all”.

That will be why the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1995. But that does not stop Rose throwing in a Communist bloc false equivalence and asserting that Jones “seems to want BBC coverage to be subject to ... quasi-Stalinist thought-policing”. Attaboy, Dacre doggie!