As widely predicted, the BBC4 programme on climate change last night was a ham-fisted stitch-up. Richard North ably explains here. It's in their genes; anyone they think is outside their neme is isolated, gulled, done over and then ultimately ridiculed with all the grace and style of a two-dime huckster. The tragedy is that they genuinely think that this counts as legitimate programme making. I concur with Richard that this technique is deployed to salve their battered egos and shore up their belief systems, it is telling that this exercise has been on the drawing board for considerable time.
Meanwhile, last night's Horizon - about latest research on pain - was also a gem of political correctness in the same mould. I deal these days a lot with people doing research into infant psychology. To cut a long story short, the central model of child development is called Attachment Theory, in which there is very substantial research that secure attachment to parents (or main carers) in the first years of life is essential in facilitating normal mental and social development. But in all the discussion about this said Attachment Theory(it was central to the argument about pain tolerance), the programme carefully and systematically - to the point of idiocy - avoided any statement that directly highlighted that a nurturing and relatively stable family life is important to a developing infant. The elephant in the room was glaringly not mentioned or circumlocuted. The BBC, of course, hates anything that supports the traditional nuclear family. Their response is Pavolovian.
Update: Here, from the WUWT blog, is a videotape editor's review of last night's programme on Lord Monckton. It's long, but the guy has 25 years experience, and it is worth including in full to show the full extent of BBC bias:
Meet the Skeptics’ was a great example of clumsy, heavy handed storytelling. Nothing more. The most telling techniques include the way Monckton was seldom given more than 10 seconds to say anything, with cutaways covering obvious edits in his talking in order to make it seem like he is saying something he probably isn’t. It’s easy. I do it everyday, though I tend to do it to enhance understanding not to misrepresent. On the other hand, Monckton’s detractors were given free reign to speak with 30, 40, 45 seconds of screen time to expound their ideas and make their point.
The part where Monckton was caught (supposedly) looking forlorn as he read the (apparently) devastating report about his address to Congress was pure pathos, made all the more emotional by the sad piano music and then the cut to him sitting alone, in the distance, looking out onto the loch, no doubt contemplating the obvious and terrible mistakes he’d made. Except we didn’t learn what those mistakes were other than a rather lame mis-attribution which he owned up to.
Murray had a chance here to actually present the sceptics’ case, however much he disagreed with it. Instead he chose to malign and mis-represent through juxtaposition (witness the homophobe and gun-wielding bigots), through use of music (the mournful piano and the buffoonery of Gilbert & Sullivan telling us what to feel), through language (such as the repeated use if the phrase ‘what he thought was true’ and it’s variations and naturally, through selective editing,
Given the exact same material I could edit a programme that would tell a totally different story. Never be told that a documentary is truth.
