THE END OF DEBATE and THE SECRET 28

Most excellent post here on The Register!  Do read it.

“Far from the Jimmy Savile scandal, the director of BBC News Helen Boaden took the witness stand in London today.

A squad of Beeb legal staff, including two barristers, crammed into a small court room to support the£354,000-a-year news chief against her opponent, a North Wales pensioner who was accompanied only by his wife. The case is a six-year freedom of information battle in which the BBC is refusing to disclose who attended a seminar it held in 2006.

This seminar is historically significant. The BBC’s global reputation for news reporting stems from its unshakable impartiality; even in wartime its commitment to maintaining evenhandedness has occasionally enraged British politicians (and sometimes servicemen). Following that 2006 seminar, however, the corporation made a decision to abandon impartiality when covering climate change – and that’s according to the BBC Trust. This was an unprecedented decision for the BBC in peacetime.

Bookmark the permalink.

23 Responses to THE END OF DEBATE and THE SECRET 28

  1. London Calling says:

    See how proudly she declares no outside influences. Her malignant stewardship of the Bigotted Broadcasting Corporation is entirely her own work. Worth not a penny of the third of a million she trousers from the impoverished license payers, surrounded by similarly paid gilded lawyers, all at our expense, lying about our weather. What a truly vile sample of our new ruling class.
    Meanwhile the leftwing comedy toadies on HIGNFY or Mock the Week or The Now Show chortle away about Etonian Toffs and class war. THIS is the class war we need, against the Class of Helen Boaden.

       45 likes

  2. Earls court says:

       3 likes

    • john in cheshire says:

      It’s apparently been censored for showing here in England.

         10 likes

      • The Highland Rebel says:

        Get yourself IP hiding software John.
        You can set your IP address to any country in the world to evade any national censorship.

           4 likes

      • Dysgwr_Cymraeg says:

        To quote Victor Meldrew: I don’t believe it!
        We are truly entering a fantasy world here, CENSORED? by whom and for what?
        1984 alive and well !
        Will get it via other servers tomorrow.
        I could truly swear here, but will resist.

           14 likes

      • petrossa says:

        Here is the downloaded version: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1828618/Common%20Purpose%20Exposed.mp4

        Pretty awful music, best mute the speakers, there is no speech.

           0 likes

        • Stewart S says:

          And ‘common purpose, have banned that?
          That’s more scary than the video

             3 likes

          • petrossa says:

            Weird isn’t it. I don’t see anything in it banworthy. Maybe the guy in underwear complained.

               1 likes

            • Stewart S says:

              Ultimately counterproductive as I went straight to WWW. stopcp.com to find out more
              A lot of it was a bit ‘tin foil hat’ but raised enough questions to make me scared of there influence
              Why isn’t John Sweeney all over this instead of those scientologist nutters?

                 4 likes

  3. Mice Height says:

    It really wouldn’t surprise me if the most highly qualified ‘expert’ in attendance was Marcus Brigstocke.

       17 likes

    • Buggy says:

      Well he’s certainly an expert in the art of being a gobby prick.

      Prickstocke: Meat suit, lead boots, hungry wolves (you know the score by now).

         8 likes

  4. chrisH says:

    An astonishing story-absolutely chilling ,if it is as written.
    If this were MacDonalds, or Distillers, Winterbourne View or NewsCorps…my God this would be the BBCs story on stilts for a week at least.
    Suppression of the little mans right know, and all that.

    Yet-not a peep anywhere but here…if true, this is a Green Bilberberg…the kind of conspiracy against the laity the BBC seems happy to sniff out for anybody but themselves.
    Truly creepy

       25 likes

  5. PhilO'TheWisp says:

    It is going to unravel. All of it. I feel it in my heart and in my bones. As my Dad said years ago “all bad bastards get theirs in the end.” I know he was right.

       20 likes

  6. Span Ows says:

    Hat-tip Clovis Man on the WUWT thread via johnnythefish…

       3 likes

  7. Dave s says:

    I always find it difficult to understand why Boaden is paid so much money. It is the turnover not profit of a repectable small business. My son employs people and makes a living on a turnover of about half her salary.
    And they have the effrontery to go on and on about the “rich” .
    Taxpayer’s money squandered on people like her and an organisation that has long since passed it’s sell by date.
    Credibility is has none and trust is going fast.

       29 likes

  8. Guest Who says:

    In a word, this whole story can only be described as ‘unique’.
    ‘the corporation made a decision to abandon impartiality’
    As a reminder, this is a blog post from a main protagonist currently up to her neck in accountability questions that they are also trying to avoid:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/09/impartiality_is_in_our_genes.html
    The end of debate title gets even more sinister as one reads the facts of the so-called impartial establishment judge in this, who seems to share Lord Patten’s views on the exceptions and exclusions that can apply to the BBC that if any of the corporations ‘news’ targets attempted would be subject to non-stop coverage and claims of Goebbelsesque censorship in support of blatant propaganda.

       12 likes

  9. Beeboidal says:

    Copied and pasted fro Delingpole’s blog, this bears repeating here.

    But the most damning observations were provided on a guest post at Harmless Sky by the (mildly sceptical) writer Richard D North (not to be confused with the Eureferendum blogspot Dr Richard North, who is much more strongly sceptical of AGW):
    I did attend the BBC climate change seminar and my impression is that it was part of the ongoing efforts by Roger Harrabin (environment analyst at the BBC) to help the corporation wrestle with the problem of balance and impartiality and robust reporting of the climate change debate.
    I think Roger Harrabin has not been a good reporter or analyst of climate change. He is not the worst by any means, but he has in my view missed many tricks. However, he has been serious if not very effective (actually often rather poor) in tackling the nature of the debate itself.
    By the way, my own view is that the biggest media failure has been in discussing the policy response to the science of climate change. I mean that though the discussion of the science has been bad the discussion of the policy response has been mostly abysmal. The BBC is only the worst of the offenders on this score because (a) they are paid to be the best and (b) their efforts have fallen so far short of their stated ambitions in this area.
    I found the seminar frankly shocking. The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the corporation) were matched by an equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the “we must support Kyoto” school of climate change activists.
    So far as I can recall I was alone in being a climate change sceptic (nothing like a denier, by the way) on both the science and policy response.
    I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed. I mean that I heard nothing that made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily). Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional journalistic curiosity on the subject. I am not saying that I knew what they all knew or thought, but I can say that I spent the day discussing the issue and don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.

       12 likes

  10. Richard Pinder says:

    This is from the complaint of members of the Space Special interest group of Mensa.

    Surprisingly the most blatantly biased statement by the BBC said that “Anthropogenic Global Warming is a fact” the IPCC using an assumption says “very likely” and the BBC which claims to be impartial says “fact“. This also does not come from the Royal Society. This evidence proves that the BBC takes a more extremely Biased view than the IPCC or the Royal Society and conflicts with the BBC Trusts claim that impartiality is important. This also now leaves open the possibility of legal action against the BBC Trust which has continually refused freedom of information requests for details of how this decision was made by what the BBC calls “the best scientific experts“.

       6 likes