WHERE OTHERS LEAD....

A so-called "investigative" scoop in the Daily Telegraph suggesting that the BBC is involved in the organisation of COMplus, an international group that supports climate change alarmism, has also caused ripples in the blogsphere. Richard North and WUWT have followed up. I'm totally in favour of enterprising, sceptical journalism, but I'm afraid on this occasion, the Telegraph is more than a year behind. I filed this story (based on research I carried out after an item by Richard North) on COMplus - whose acolytes include toerags such as former Labour ministers Eliot Morley and Stephen Byers - on March 15, 2010 (with a follow-up amplifying some of the key points on the same day) and gave chapter on verse why it was an insiduous menace in which the BBC was playing a major role. EU Referendum also had this, detailing the full scale of COMplus linkages. What was unearthed back then went far beyond the Telegraph's latest revelations, and I spelled out one aspect of the way the influence operated:

The scale and modus operandi of this activity beggars belief, and the BBC is in every sense a key component, putting it firmly in bed with the main greenie activists around the world. Look for example, at just one of the COMplus partner organisations, the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE). Naturally, its main goal is to make greenie propaganda (the annual report is a manual about the chilling art). The main outlet is on the BBC World television service; its programmes such as Earth Report reach 172 countries and notch up audiences of 100m plus. Principal funders of TVE include the World Wildlife Fund, Christian Aid, and Oxfam - the usual suspect NGOs who, in their pursuit of climate change nonsense, have become polticial activists whose main aim is to spread the lie that the West is to blame for all the developing world ills. Predictably, TVE is run by one Cheryl Campbell, a former BBC journalist (and greenie fanatic) who was also communications chief of Christian Aid.

Also in on the act is the Reuters Foundation, which, as B-BBC also established in a previous post is the founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This body is run partly by BBC journalist James Painter, a climate change activist who is a model of his type; Goebbels would have been proud of him.

I don 't want to be churlish, and I am pleased that the Telegraph is finally looking at the rat's nest of establishment money-down-the-drain activity that supports climate change hysteria. But if investigative ace Jason Lewis properly read blogs such as EU Referendum and B-BBC, he'd truly be ahead of the pack. The real scandal here is that the BBC is not only involved in COMplus, but also directly part of a huge related network of climate change activism.