In a comment under Geoff Chambers’ article, Global Warmongering, I drew attention to a BBC Verify article which sought to rubbish President-Elect Trump’s criticisms of the situation relating to the terrible Los Angeles fires. It was headed “Fact-checking criticism of California Democrats over fires” and was clearly rushed out to defend California Democrats and to point out that (as the BBC sees it) that everything Mr Trump says is rubbish.

The BBC Verify fact-checking article is already, a little over 24 hours after it first saw the light of day, on its eighth iteration, according to News Sniffer (thank you Stew Green and Jit for drawing this to our attention). This story represents in a nutshell why we can’t trust the BBC, especially where stories about climate change and Donald Trump are concerned (it’s a perfect storm for the BBC when those two issues are combined in a single story).

Anyone reading my comments generally here at Cliscep and specifically under Geoff’s article, will readily appreciate that I am a long way from being Donald Trump’s greatest fan. However, my dislike of him, his behaviour, and many of his policies doesn’t blind me to the BBC’s blatantly obvious Trump Derangement Syndrome. In this case it has left the BBC Verify team (“BBC Verify is dedicated to examining the facts and claims behind a story to try to determine whether or not it is true”) with a lot of egg on its face, but the BBC hasn’t recognised this at all. Although the article has been repeatedly amended, nowhere in any of the versions is there an admission that this is so. I suppose admitting that BBC Verify’s articles have to be repeatedly amended in order to correct earlier errors wouldn’t exactly instil confidence in the Verify brand. Although there are various changes affecting different aspects of the story, for the sake of simplicity I concentrate on the fire hydrants issue.

Version One

Is there is ‘no water for fire hydrants’?

Trump has also said that there was “no water for fire hydrants”.

There have been reports that certain fire hydrants have run dry.

This is down to high demand placing a heavy strain on the system, according to local officials and experts.

In Pasadena, Fire Chief Chad Augustin said the area experienced a short period of time where pressure was low on a small amount of hydrants. All issues had been resolved, he added.

“There are very localised incidents of this unfolding where the fire hydrants have had insufficient water pressure for firefighters to use them, but that’s not because LA is running out of water,” says Mr Swain.

“There are thousands of firefighters and hundred of fire engines drawing upon water, and ultimately only so much can flow through pipes at a time.”

That’s all fairly clear. Trump is making a mountain out of a molehill. There have been some brief issues with pressure and demand, but nothing to suggest that LA is running out of water, and all issues have been resolved. Silly dishonest Mr Trump.

Version Two

This version makes no changes with regard to the question of fire hydrants. It makes some minor amendments that – in fairness – don’t need to be specially mentioned at the end of the article, and if these amendments were the only ones made, I wouldn’t make an issue out of it. Amusingly, it’s worth noting in passing that one of the amendments was to describe Daniel Swain of the California Institute for Water Resources as a climate scientist rather than as a Climate Scientist (is upper case reserved for big beasts only, I wonder?).

Version Three

Still nothing to get excited about. The only change is to point out that Governor Newsom is a Democrat (can’t have readers being confused between the good guys and the bad guys).

Version Four

Some minor changes were made elsewhere in the article, but now the fire hydrants story is changing. Some paragraphs have been added:

Some hydrants in higher-elevation parts of Pacific Palisades also reportedly went dry. Former Department of Water and Power general manager Martin Adams told the LA Times that the Santa Ynez Reservoir might have prevented this if open, but only for a time because of the enormous demand.

Oops! Still, no harm done, and the story can still be minimised:

“You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” he said. “Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”

Phew, we’re saved – an expert has been found to say this would have made no difference.

Version Five

It’s starting to look a little tricky now that Governor Newsom (remember him – he’s a good guy, a Democrat) has started to ask difficult questions:

On Friday, Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and the unavailability of water from the reservoir.

Obviously for the BBC it was best to include the paragraph so as to avoid accusations of omitting key facts, but not to add any additional comment or amend its earlier conclusions. Good grief, that would be to admit that they rushed a story out in error, and that would never do.

Version Six

Oh dear, the story has by now gone pear-shaped. OH well, sauve qui peut, and all that. Let’s get on the front foot and look good by making it clear that the BBC has found all this out itself by being really good at its job and having its journalists talk to firefighters:

Is there no water for fire hydrants’?

On Friday, Governor Newsom confirmed reports that have been swirling this week that a water shortage hit the fire hydrants, hampering the emergency response.

Firefighters in Los Angeles have told the BBC firsthand that they experienced shortages.

Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and the unavailability of water from the reservoir.

In a letter addressed to the heads of the LA Department of Water and Power and LA County Public Works, Newsom said that reports of inadequate water supplies are “deeply troubling” .

“Losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he wrote.

“We need answers to how that happened,” he continued, adding that he expects the agencies to “fully and transparently” share information and records for the state’s probe.

Adam Van Gerpen, a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, confirmed to the BBC that his crew, which has been tackling the Pacific Palisades blaze, and other crews battling other wildfires, ran out of water, forcing them to “improvise”.

It’s all rather embarrassing, as is the fact that this confirms what Trump claimed, which BBC Verify initially said wasn’t true. What’s to be done? Easy! Drop the paragraph which has Trump making his claims. Remember this paragraph?

Trump has also said that there was “no water for fire hydrants”.

It was still there in version five. By version six it has disappeared.

Version Seven

Nothing of significance to report here – after all the real damage was done between versions six and seven. The only amendment was to explain who Daniel Swain is – initially there were three references to him and now there’s only one. The omission of the explanation of his identity would have left readers confused, as it had disappeared when they chopped the first two references.

Version Eight

Oh dear, it seems there’s no hiding from it after all. The reference to Trump has been re-inserted:

On Friday, Newsom confirmed Trump’s claim that there had been no water for some fire hydrants, which hampered the emergency response.

Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and “the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir”.

In a letter addressed to the heads of the LA Department of Water and Power and LA County Public Works, Newsom said that reports of inadequate water supplies were “deeply troubling”.

It’s all a far cry from version one.

Conclusion

It’s beyond time time BBC Verify is ditched. It’s long been obvious to me that it isn’t the sword of truth but a rapid deployment weapon the BBC uses to discredit stories and people it disapproves of. It’s been badly caught out on this one, but lacks the good grace to admit it and to make it clear to readers that the article has been substantially changed. If I were inclined to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt (I’m not) I would accept that it’s a fast-moving story and that what initially appears to be the case can turn out not to be. However, there are two reasons why I don’t accept that to be the case here. First the manifest focus on Trump and the blatant attempt to discredit his utterances. Second the failure to acknowledge that the article has had to be substantially amended. It’s just all too typical of the BBC. And I’m fed up of it.

24 Comments

  1. Thank you Mark. Personally I think the key problem is that they set out to provide an authoritative fact check rather than a mere news report. That means that the initial version must be thoroughly researched, not thrown together by the intern. Wherever they were not 100% sure of their ground, they ought to have said nothing, or put in ample caveats. The fact is, they knew nothing, they made claims based on prejudice, and those claims were later shown to be pure bunk.

    Another disgraceful effort by the BBC.

    Liked by 4 people

  2. Watching this latest denoument of the democrat/woke oligarchy frantically seek to cover-up the implosion of woke policy and still pretend Trumpis evil would be more entertaining if people weren’t dying from the implosion.

    Liked by 3 people

  4. Me neither . I have deleted the duplicate and liked the comment that remains. 😊

    Like

  5. I’m far from being a fan of Trumps, but the principle must be that everyone is entitled to a fair crack of the whip – even your worst enemy.

    Like

  6. Let’s be honest, if Trump stated that the Moon was NOT made of cheese, BBC Verify would immediately find a “expert” to confirm that not only was the Moon made of cheese, but that it had the texture of Brie and if mined could provide sufficient cheese to feed the Earth for 12gizillion years.

    BBC Verify was always a vanity project but as with all vanity projects, failure is inevitable but the BBC will continue until such time as it is finally, thankfully privatised and broken up.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. BBC Smearify – thanks Josh!

    They did a hitjob on Musk very recently re. his comments about a memo which the BBC says doesn’t exist. Trump Derangement Syndrome, Musk Derangement Syndrome. The BBC are losing it. Their bias is so blatant now that it’s unsustainable.

    Image

    Liked by 5 people

  9. They’re just the lying,leftist media and have always have been.

    The first thing the NZ media stated at the start of these fires was some bint on the telly saying…”Meanwhile, Donald Trump has made UNFOUNDED allegations that there was no water for the hydrants…..”

    For the last 4 years we’ve heard…. “Donald Trump’s FALSE accusations the the 2020 election was stolen…”

    For the last 50 years we’ve heard… “the REAL, EXISTENTIAL threat of ‘climate change’ “.

    They obviously think the public are morons…and to a certain extent, they are right.

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  10. The ongoing changes to the article are borderline bizarre (unless one believes that the BBC’s objectives are to blame climate change; to rubbish Trump; and to clear the Democrats in charge in LA specifically and in California generally). The penultimate version included this:

    In a memo to Mayor Bass last month, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned that the cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, such as wildfires”.

    But it now looks like this:

    LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told CNN that the budget cut had “severely” affected the department’s ability to respond to the disaster.

    This was the penultimate version of a subsequent paragraph:

    Mayor Bass responded to the criticism, saying: “I think if you go back and look at the reductions that were made, there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.”

    And now it looks like this:

    Mayor Bass responded to the criticism, saying: “There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.”According to the LA Times, after the 2024-25 budget was passed, the city council approved $53m in pay raises for firefighters and $58m for new kit, such as firetrucks.

    Which is all rather different. What facts have emerged to justify this watering-down of the criticism of the cuts? Or is it simply that the BBC’s position is falling apart and it felt the need to come to the rescue of the beleaguered Mayor?

    Liked by 3 people

  11. I have just finished watching an interesting debate on ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’. After interviewing Peter Kyle on various IT topics she turned to an invited panel to discuss the issues that had been raised, particularly the proposed removal of fact checking over in the States. The historian Simon Schama started the ball rolling by claiming that we live in a time when opinion matters more than fact. Nothing terribly interesting there. However, it was the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen’s opening comment that raised my eyebrows. He said, “There is an argument, which is fair, that the fact checkers haven’t been great — lots of mainstream media organisations, not in the UK but more so in America, actively did cover up things…”

    I can understand why Ben would be keen not to offend his host by putting the BBC in the same camp, but it does annoy me when public figures go out of their way to exempt the BBC from any criticism of potential impropriety. Its time these people woke up.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. Attention BBC…

    Exclusive — Firefighter Blasts Lack of Resources: ‘We Could Have Saved Buildings Like Caruso Did’ – 12 Jan 2025

    Caruso, a businessman and developer, managed to save his own Palisades Village mall by hiring a private firefighting company with its own water tankers.

    Videos of Caruso’s mall, and the surrounding area, show the stark contrast between private and public services.

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/01/12/exclusive-firefighter-blasts-lack-of-resources-we-could-have-saved-buildings-like-caruso-did/

    Liked by 3 people

  14. Disclosure. Unlike the BBC I am happy to draw attention to my own less than stealthy edit. Some of the quoted lines were not correctly justified in the quotation boxes, so I have corrected this error (without changing any of the content) and I have taken the opportunity to correct a typo.

    Like

  15. Thank you for your honesty, Mark. Way above the BBC – and the Aus ABC.

    As I noted in the previous thread, both those organisations are incapable of objectivity when they dislike some fact, opinion etc. While that also applies to the rest of the MSM to a large degree, it is tempered by their need for clickbait.

    I’ve been watching the reactive squawks from climate activists with some wryness, considering these reactions are essentially aimed at the blame game rather than preventing another wretched disaster. As the actual known history of the Santa Ana winter windstorms (at least 5000 years) is re-iterated, the scream that these winds are caused by AGW is predictably changing to “current extremes” caused by AGW – so I’ve asked for hard data to demonstrate that. Zilch so far. I’ve even seen one comment to the effect that this winter windstorm is unseasonal … I have no words for that.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. ianl, Thank you for that. Regarding the blame game, I noticed this comment from Robert Swan on Bishop Hill Unthreaded (which is still a thing, albeit with very few contributors these days):

    Kind of ironic that our governments are always warning about some imagined crisis on the horizon, yet, whenever a real crisis hits, they are thoroughly unprepared.

    I think that about sums it up.

    Like

  17. Mark: …”whenever a real crisis hits, they are thoroughly unprepared”

    Your quote was about wildfire preparedness but it is also true of flood defences and water supply. We are generally not well prepared for the climate we have had and have now, regardless of any future climate change. Most flood defences are inadequate and many utilities have delayed construction of reservoirs and infrastructure for supplying water to increasing populations. Climate change is cited as an excuse for poor planning and lack of investment. As the great hydrologist Vit Klemes wrote in 1990:

    “Climate variability has long been a factor in dealing with water resource systems and represents only one of the many uncertainties with which water resources professionals had always had to cope………….The real issues in water resources systems (such as flood control and water supply) lie elsewhere , everywhere , right now, not 30, 50 years hence; and they are crying out for solutions, for action, for political will to act, for resources rather than for deep analyses of shallow facts and conjectures.”

    Liked by 1 person

  18. The First Law of Climate states that everything bad that happens is the fault of climate change.

    It does not matter if there is incompetence, bad planning, laziness, magical thinking or corruption. Local politicians are powerless in the face of climate change, and cannot be held to account for any disaster that occurs.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Jit and potentilla,

    Yes, human failing never counts if climate change can be blamed instead. It’s a third of a century since a new reservoir was built in the UK, since when the population has increased by around 22 million. But water shortages are always due to climate change.

    Like

  20. Sometimes news stories just come together to make the point:

    “Water shortage fears as Labour’s first AI growth zone sited close to new reservoir

    First datacentre site proposed seven miles from Abingdon reservoir planned for water-stressed south-east England”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/labour-ai-datacentre-growth-zone-water-shortages-abingdon-reservoir

    Labour’s first artificial intelligence growth zone will be sited close to the UK’s first new reservoir in 30 years, sparking fears that the AI push will add to the “severe pressure” on water supplies in the area.

    Keir Starmer announced on Monday that he would hugely increase artificial intelligence capacity and reduce planning restrictions on companies that wanted to build datacentres by setting up “growth zones” with fewer constraints.

    The first of these will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, only seven miles from a reservoir planned by Thames Water in Abingdon, which was supposed to provide water to people in the severely water-stressed south-east of England. This is the area of the country most at risk of running out of water, according to the Environment Agency. Oxfordshire has faced particular issues, with areas reliant on bottled water during heatwaves.

    AI datacentres use a large amount of water, as their servers generate heat. To prevent computer systems overheating and shutting down, the centres use cooling towers and outside air systems, both of which need clean, fresh water. AI consumes bewteen 1.8 and 12 litres of water for each kilowatt hour of energy usage across Microsoft’s global datacentres. One study estimates that global AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 – the equivalent of nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption....

    Like

  21. I confess to being very surprised to find this at the Guardian. Surprised, but pleasantly so. Not a mention of climate change (oops, of course there is, but for once it’s low key), and other explanations for the seriousness of the LA fires:

    “‘Criminally reckless’: why LA’s urban sprawl made wildfires inevitable – and how it should rebuild”

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/15/criminally-reckless-la-wildfires-urban-sprawl

    A century of foolhardy development, including public subsidies for rebuilding in the firebelt, hugely contributed to this tragedy, writes our architecture critic. LA must rethink – and build upwards not outwards.

    This disaster has been on the cards for decades. In his 1995 essay, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, the late activist and urban theorist Mike Davis charted how generations of unbridled residential construction in the fire-prone hills had created the perfect conditions for a firestorm. He railed against the “rampant uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs” which saw timber-framed homes “scattered like so much kindling across isolated hilltops and ridges”. The forests of southern California are supposed to burn as part of their natural cycle, he argued, and it was criminally reckless of the authorities not only to allow but actively incentivise development in such fire-prone areas.

    The region’s extraordinary fire hazard, he pointed out, is shaped by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the Santa Ana winds, the strong, dry gusts that blow in towards the coast from the north-east. The valleys and gorges around LA act as giant bellows, accelerating the fire winds as they are funnelled through the landscape, made hotter and drier by the climate crisis. Over the last week, these winds have reached more than 80mph, blowing embers from ridge to ridge and street to street, making the fires virtually impossible to contain. As one emergency responder put it: “At 10 miles per hour, I’m a firefighter. At 30 miles per hour, I’m an observer.” Any higher, another added, you’re just a wind sock.

    But there’s no fire without fuel and ignition, and the relentless march of homes and cars into the tinder-dry hills has provided both. The foundations were laid over a century ago, as LA’s population boomed 13-fold, from 170,000 in 1900 to 2.2m by 1930. People were drawn west by the promise of owning their own wooden bungalow in a garden of earthly delights, a land of warm winters and citrus trees in every back yard.

    The city sprawled outwards and upwards, as new arrivals sought their own piece of Eden, searching for “thickets of privacy”, as the late architecture critic Reyner Banham put it, away from dense urban life. Where people went, fires followed. And every time, the official response only exacerbated the situation. “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale,” Davis writes, “as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire victims.”

    Warnings were ignored. In 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, designer of the California state park system, suggested that 10,000 acres of Malibu mountains and beaches be preserved as a public park. Instead, the land was flogged to “wealthy pyrophiles” as theorist Davis calls them, to build their fire-prone retreats. Many have burned and been rebuilt several times since….

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Mark – ain’t it strange BBC have that article neatly tucked away in the “world – US & Canada” tab & well down the article list at that.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. The BBC article made it to its 10th version on 12th January. It’s fascinating to see the changes, some of which seem to have the potential to have been politically inspired. So far as I can see, there is still no acknowledgement in the article or at its end that it’s been changed. So much for the reliability of BBC Verify and the trust we can repose in it.

    Liked by 1 person

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