Roger Harrabin breaks BBC impartiality rules

Posted on by Paul MatthewsIn Uncategorized1 Minute Read

 

On Friday night Nick Robinson hosted the Johnson v Corbyn debate with scrupulous impartiality, ensuring that each candidate had the same amount of time to speak, in accordance with BBC guidelines.

But notorious BBC climate propagandist Roger Harrabin seems to think the rules don’t apply to him. In this incoherent tweet (despite apparently having a degree in English, Harrabin has remarkably poor communication skills) he promotes a “FoE green scorechart”. It’s not clear what this scorechart is, nor is it clear who “you” refers to. But please do take him up on his offer of getting in touch via twitter or email roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk

In another tweet Harrabin promoted the same Friends of the Earth message to his Green Blob buddies George Monbiot and Caroline Lucas.

Harrabin has an article on the BBC website, General election 2019: Labour ‘beats other parties on climate change‘, just five days before the election. In the article, the opinion of Friends of the Earth is presented at great length, with numerous quotes from their spokesman, a Mr David Timms. Praise is piled upon the Labour party, while the Conservative Party is described as “disappointing” and “bad”.

Here’s another “Friends of the Earth says…” tweet from Harrabin just a few days ago, and yet another one the day before that.

He has been called out on his blatant political campaigning by GWPF, by Matt Ridley and by me, but he continues to do it.

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20 Comments

  1. Pingback: Roger Harrabin breaks BBC impartiality rules | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

  3. Few people are impartial. We certainly aren’t. If Horrorbin does not use his BBC affiliation, is he doing wrong? Should someone like Horrorbin be stripped of his personal right to comment on twitter, even during election periods? There are arguments on both sides I feel.

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  5. BBC flacks need to be deceptive and prejudiced because if they honestly reported the facts on climate they would be admitting that they have been wrong about this issue.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Bad policies are the result of biased narrative.
    – For you that means your energy bills will be higher as you pay for the subsidy & inefficiency costs of an electricity system with solar/wind prioritised.. but that also feeds into the cost of everything granny pays for
    e.g. less nurses in hospital.
    – For people suffering flood damage it could mean that had authorities not been distracted they would have proper preventative measures that prevented it.
    – Similarly for other measures if we weren’t throwing money at other countries to be green
    .. we might be using the resources to fix other things like homelessness.

    – For people who do choose to turn down their heating it could mean they die earlier than they might have done .. ie bad govt policies cost them life days

    By allowing proper info & debate from all sides we’d get good policies not bad.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Well it was obviously directed at someone but ended up being broadcast to the world. It’s the kind of thing I’d do, cos I don’t understand how to werk Twitter, but for heavy users it seems a little odd. But if the greens only score 31/45, what the deuce do FoE want?

    Yesterday’s story about the oceans “running out of oxygen” was far more concerning. I complained within minutes of it appearing that the figures given, and headline, were impossible scaremongering. After that the beeb promoted it to the first item on the front page of the news. In this case, the beeb really did jump the shark – even using a photo of one to promote the story.

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  10. Alan, the issue is really his biased article on the BBC website. Also he was saying the same things on the radio yesterday.

    JIT, yes, another ridiculous scare story given top billing as BBC “news”. Complete junk of course. They seemed to be claiming that the fraction of a degree of ocean warming was causing a 40% drop in oxygen – as I switched channel.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. The “oxygen scare” is not just down to the BBC, it was fed out to the world media in Madrid. France 24 showed plastic bottles floating in the sea somewhere and made the claim about oxygen disappearing because of “climate change”. All broadcasters, especially government ones, are the same. The story comes from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, (IUCN) a grand sounding title, but another UN shadow entity, as described by the late Henry Lamb, in “The Rise of Global Governance”, a copy is here: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_un06.htm

    He quotes Orwell’s 1984 in his introduction:
    “The people could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

    “In 1948, (Julian) Huxley and his long-time friend and colleague, Max Nicholson, both of whom were involved with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, created the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

    The IUCN drew heavily from the 50-year-old [in 1999] British Fauna and Flora Preservation Society (FFPS) for its leadership, funding and its members. Sir Peter Scott, FFPS Chairman, drafted the IUCN Charter and headed one of its important Commissions. This important non-governmental organization was instrumental in the formation of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 and the World Resources Institute (WRI) in 1982. These three NGOs have become the driving force behind the rise of global governance.

    Huxley and Nicholson formed WWF primarily as a way to fund the work of the IUCN. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, served as President. An auxiliary organization called the “1001 Club” charged an initiation fee of $10,000 which went into a trust fund to provide ongoing revenues to WWF. The WWF and the IUCN share an office building in Gland, Switzerland.” https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/wwf-headquarters/view/google/

    IUCN describe themselves as the global authority on the status of Nature and they are part of the UN matrix, https://www.iucn.org/theme/global-policy/our-work/united-nations-general-assembly. Their latest intervention is all part of the continuing Litany Of Doom.These things are planned in advance as part of the long term strategy for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Huge sums of money are always required. They are massively suppported, including by most governments. https://www.iucn.org/about/donors-and-partners.

    It doesn’t matter whether what they say is true or not. In the same way that there has been no media or public recognition of the lies in the Attenborough shockumentaries, the meme is transmitted, whether it be Dead Zones, Acid Oceans, Hole in the Ozone Layer, Acid Rain, Global Warming, Global Heating, Ten Years To Save The Planet, X % of Species Face Extinction, the agenda goes on because it is self feeding and self sustaining. Politicians are in thrall to the global NGO network and many of these groups work both inside and outside government and have major input into the IPCC reports. There is always an eager audience for disaster prognostications, the end of the world is nigh….really.

    Liked by 4 people

  12. Paul. I was very specific, I was only discussing where Horrorbin was NOT using his BBC affiliation, which you also seemed to be focussing upon. There is a legitimate discussion to be had, whether Horrorbin should be allowed to use his “fame” built from his BBC identity to comment politically.

    I doubt if you could find anyone who views BBC news, who does not know about Horrorbin’s biases and does not either agree with his or ignores them. His impact, regardless of how biased he is, is IMHO, likely to be near zero.

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  14. Dennis: Didn’t know any of that about the IUCN. But none of it surprises me. Thank you.

    On the BBC more generally:

    We’ve heard this kind of thing before during elections but I hold out a little more hope this time.

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  15. Why should we pay BBC TV a fee for peddling gross bias, inaccuracies, and falsehoods on the political, natural world, and anthropogenic climate change alarmism fronts BBC TV, although still airing occasional very fine programmes, should report news not its opinions. . The BBC is now a biased mouth for the green, environmental, and climate alarmisn lobbies. We hear little or nothing of the data and opinions of the multitude who oppose these opinions. The time has come for the TV licence fee to go the way of the dog and radio licences, and for the BBC to become independent, acquire somehumility, shrink, and pay for its serves by subscription and/or advertising.

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  16. Harrabin was up to something like this in the 2017 General Election (and may well have been doing it in General Elections before that), as described in this blog post from David Keighley’s news-watch site in 2017:

    http://news-watch.co.uk/bbc-environment-analyst-harrabin-dont-vote-conservative-or-ukip/

    Basically Harrabin told Radio 4 listeners not to vote for the Conservatives or UKIP in the 2017 General Election (UKIP was still regarded as a significant electoral force in 2017). The blog post includes a transcript of the radio broadcast segment.

    It does make you wonder how Green-biased an environmental journalist has to be before the BBC starts to think they are a liability. The only environmental journalist I can think of that the BBC is rumoured to have got rid of for being too Green-biased is Richard Black, back in 2012:

    http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/23/the-black-departure.html

    “And last year, BBC environment correspondent Richard Black left the BBC amidst wider job cuts at the corporation.”

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  18. just watched the BBC QT 18-30 prog.

    1st reaction – what a shouty Labour person.
    2nd – Will be having a Fillet Steak this Weekend

    and some want 16yr olds voting!!!! god help us!!!!

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