CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

I was tied up yesterday when this story about the BBC trustees investigation of dodgy environment programmes broke. This morning, I’ve been digging further, and I suspect we only know a fraction of what’s gone on. I think there’s evidence of a a frantic but very extensive cover-up.

The Television Trust for the Environment (mentioned here in the BBC’s sanisitised version of their investigations) was for years one of the BBC’s biggest suppliers of environment programmes. There are dozens of items like this about its programmes. But – astonishingly – TVE itself has disappeared and its website is now defunct. Here’s proof that it once did exist, but this morning, this is the only type of reference to it that I can find.

I know the executive director of the organisation, Cheryl Campbell (used to work with her, many years ago), and quite a lot about the charity because I had dealings with it a few years back. It was founded in 1984 by Central Television and had grown to be a huge greenie outfit producing dozens of films a year for the BBC, with funding derived from a range of sources, including the Swedish and Dutch governments and the usual suspect greenie foundations. I wrote about it in previous posts, for example, here where I posed questions about funding and support of the sort now supposedly being investigated by the trustees.

Maybe readers with better internet skills than me can find it, but I’ve been trying every variation of the name and web address and not managed to trace anything but cross-references that go nowhere.

So where has it gone? And why? But it surely can’t be coincidence. And one thing that I am certain about is that, meanwhile, Richard Ayre, the BBC trustee appointed to investigate this rather fetid affair is emphatically not in any sense independent. First, he worked for the BBC for almost 30 years before becoming a trustee, and as a former controller of editorial policy, is unquestionably one of the main architects of the current BBC editorial approach. Second, he has direct greenie form. Mr Ayre was chairman of Article 19, a body that claims to be about journalistic freedom, but is in fact an organisation enforcing the UN rights agenda, including its belief that all the world’s ills are caused by nasty, carbon belching westerners. Put another way, Mr Ayre is an unqualified supporter of the lefty greenie agenda, and not only that, openly boasts about his Article 19 links on the trustee website. So how on earth can he be trusted to investigate venality among greenie activists and programme makers?

I keep saying it: the BBC, rotten to the core.

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33 Responses to CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

  1. Rated says:

    The website for this used to exist at http://www.tve.org but has been deleted between July and now. 

    If you go to the internet wayback machine you can see the last time it managed to take a scrape of the site was July: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/www.tve.org- click any of the blue circles on the calendar and you can see what content was archived. 

    Hope that helps.

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  2. Sres says:

    Site was removed from the web on the 24th Oct.

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  3. Sres says:

    @tveinspire still spouting

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  4. Martin says:

    Very curious!

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  5. jim kurtz says:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20110605132849/http://www.tve.org/tests/about-tve.html See What Do We Do
    We inspire viewers to lead a greener life. Entrepreneurs to take up the sustainability challenge. Corporations to see why they need to go green. Parents to educate their daughters as well as their sons. Decision-makers to think, and act, differently.

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  6. jim kurtz says:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20110605151412/http://www.tve.org/tests/er-main.html

    Discover how we’re changing the planet – and it’s changing us – in the latestof tve‘s flagship series of half-hour documentaries.
    <img src=”http://web.archive.org/web/20110605151412im_/http://www.tve.org/tests/assets/er-240.jpg” alt=”earth report logo”/>earth report is broadcast on BBC World News to 300 million homes in more than 170 countries and reaches half-a-billion people via national, regional and local channels.

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  7. Peter Parker says:

    Think you’ve hit a gold mine there Robin. The archive of TVE films must contain 100’s of cases of paid-for Big Green advocacy – posing as impartial BBC documentaries. The fact the site has seemingly been yanked without explanation during the BBC audit looks extremely fishy. Thank god for the WayBackMachine.  Follow the money. Plenty more dirt to be uncovered.

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  8. Natsman says:

    The BBC – part of the all-encompassing cancer of misinformation, ideology and common purpose.  The only way of ridding ourselves of this cancer (or part of it) is to remove the vanguard at the forefront of the spreading mechanism.  The BBC are the perfect example of this – they need to be eradicated, or at the very least independently investigated and made to publicise their wrongdoings, unreservedly apologise to those they are paid to “serve”, and visibly change – rather quickly, or face the consequences.

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:

      Short of privatizing the BBC or scrapping it altogether, the only real solution is a complete purge of upper management and a closure of BBC News and news-oriented programmes on other channels (with the exception of 6 and 10 o’clock news, if you must).

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      • Umbongo says:

        DP

        In the UK that kind of thing never happens.  Even when we had a working democracy corrupt institutions weren’t abolished or cleansed.  Rather they were “hollowed out”, deprived of finance and authority, virtually ignored but left in place to wither on the vine.  Look, for instance, at the Church of England.

        No-one (unless it’s for their own nefarious purposes eg the BBC giving acres of broadcasting space to the marxist who heads this organisation and ex-SWP clerics sanctifying the nihilism of ignorant youf) gives a toss for what the CoE thinks, says or does.  It’s disappearing up its own backside of moral relativity, diversity madness and pathetic efforts to get wiv de program (whatever program it happens to be that day).  The CoE won’t be abolished for the whited sepulchre that it is: it will just collapse gracefully over the next century or so and our descendants in the 23rd century will look back on it as one with the Senate of Ancient Rome or the CPSU: influential in their time but now dead and buried.

        So it should go with the BBC.  Once the licence tax is done away with and the BBC has to enter the real world, the machine transmitting the malign influence of its lefty narrative would have to be supported by producing output which people actually wish to view or know rather than that which the BBC deems should be viewed or known.  I don’t imagine though that an institution rotting with at least 60 years of corruption would change overnight but the reality of having to support and justify itself could work a miracle of self-awareness.

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      • mcdonaldrobert says:

        No chance of the BBC mafia managers challenging themselves by reducing their empire of support management buddies.
        Incompetent and overpaid as well as overmanned .
        Definitely time to make the licence fee a metter of choice.

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  9. Umbongo says:

    And along comes Bishop Hill http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/11/16/smaller-world.html to reveal another part of the small world inhabited by the BBC climate freaks

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    • Geyza says:

      The corruption undertaken by these environmentalists is incredibly extensive.  Using licence-fee payers and tax-payers money to buy influence within the BBC and then use them to overtly abandon all impartiality and solely promote the green agenda on the BBC, to create even more reason to encourage more grants and more money to flow to the “anti-capitalist” environmentalists.

      What an enormous scam.

      Gather as much evidence as you can and get the MET police to launch a fraud investigation.

      This goes further that mere “heads must roll at the BBC” this is endemic fraud and people need to be locked up!

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:

      One of the commenters (CCS) points out this bit of bias:

      Later Joe Smith wrote a book “Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth.” Guess what? Roger Harrabin, without disclosing any link with Joe Smith, reviewed it and said it was one of the finest essays he had seen on the predicament we are in. 

      Typical.  As always, if the BBC fails to label someone or something, you can bet on what they actually are.

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      • My Site (click to edit) says:

        if the BBC fails to label someone or something, you can bet on what they actually are.’

        Going through the overnight posts, I have captured every instance where the BBC has used a source, expert or vox pop to push a narrative, without clarifying the rampant influencing context that these folk are their fellow travellers.

        There seem to be scores.

        This is unacceptable.

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  10. Peter Parker says:

    Click to access Broadcasting%20for%20change.pdf

    Emphasis is mine:

    “TVE became a broker for films on the environment and development. In effect, we were a dating service, matching broadcasts with non-broadcast finance for the story ideas we developed”

    Paid advocacy – Disguised as unbiased BBC programming?

    “The first film on the vanishing ozone layer, the first pan-european production about acid rain…”The Last Snow On Earth” that got the environment onto the front page of the UKs most popular tabloid.”

    Reads like a catalog of every piece of alarmist bullshit ever invented.

    “Those films went on to make a genuine impact on public opinion and international decision making. By the end of the 1980’s TVE was recognised the world over by donor bodies and Television alike [the BBC?] for doing what it was set up to do…

    A special set of conditions made our work possible. There were only a handful of channels and the public service remits – and budgets – were strong

    And so it goes on. So brazen about it. Hoist by their own petard.

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    • Umbongo says:

      I notice that (per the FT on 14 April 1984) TVE’s international advisory council included one David Attenborough who – in 1984 – was making The Living Planet for the BBC.  Sir David is, of course, scheduled to give an extended bleat of warmism in the last episode of Frozen Planet on 7 December

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  11. p.jackson77 says:

    Things will  never improve with Patton at the helm, as I point out <ahref=”http://http://wwwcrierinthewilderness.blogspot.com/2011/10/sign-of-times.html”>here</a>

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  12. Normainius Brainer says:

    Their website might be down at the moment… but they still have a facebook page:
    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32388752816

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  13. BBCwaste says:

    They aren’t a production house they are an interest group.

    Can you imagine Forest (the pro-tobacco lobby) setting up a TV production house and being _paid_ by us to produce propaganda… there were be outrage…

    About time the blowtorch was put on this lot and we had some transparency.

    Excellent work Robin!

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  14. John Smith says:

    The beeb is corrupt & the pope is a catholic, bears poo in the woods

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