The BBC pits six lawyers against one questioning blogger, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky, who was making an FOI request for the 28 names. In the process, the judge demonstrates he has partisan views on climate change.
Via Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
As expected, the BBC has won its legal battle against blogger Tony Newbery. Newbery wanted the list of “scientific experts” who attended a BBC seminar at which, according to the BBC Trust, they convinced the broadcaster to abandon impartiality and take a firmly warmist position when reporting climate change.
When the Beeb refused to divulge who these people were and who they worked for, Newbery took the corporation to an information tribunal. Now the names and affiliations of the 28 people who decided the Beeb climate stance – acknowledged by the Corporation to include various non-scientists such as NGO people, activists etc – will remain a secret.
…
The other lay judge, former Haringey councillor Narendra Makanji, appears to have strong views on climate-change skeptics, as he tweeted here this year: “Michael Hintze who dines at no 10 is backer of Global Warming Policy Foundation, climate change deniers fronted by Nigel Lawson.” We asked the Information Commissioner’s Office how a lay judge with such partisan views on climate change came to oversee hearings so closely coupled to the subject of climate. Campaigning lay judges would not normally be appointed to sit on such a case, a spokesman noted, and concerns would be legitimate grounds for appeal.
–Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 9 November 2012
Newbery writes about the affair:
Harmless Sky in court – a fair hearing?
Andrew Orlowski of The Register has written a very accurate and fair account of happenings at the Central London Civil Justice Centre last Monday. This was the first day’s hearing of my appeal against the Information Commissioner’s decision that the BBC were correct to refuse a request for the names of the ‘best scientific experts’ who attended their seminar entitled ‘Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting’ in January 2006. This expert advice was cited on page 40 of the BBC Trust’s excellent report ‘From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century’ as the authority for a very important editorial decision.
I’ve written about this very strange seminar here and many other times at Harmless Sky.
==============================================================
Bishop Hill writes:
Tony Newbery has lost his FOI claim for the details of the attendees at the BBC’s climate change seminar. The decision was issued in an extraordinarily short period of ten days (it normally takes four weeks).
Andrew Montford has written a 26-page guide to the seminar saga, and the subsequent Freedom of information battle: you can buy it in ebook format here for ~75 cents.
Footnote: Given that the BBC is publicly funded, and has denied public disclosure of the information which by law should be public, this list of 28 won’t likely stay secret very long. In every organization, there’s usually a few people with a conscience. As we’ve seen in Climategate, it only takes one. – Anthony
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Lazy says:
“…the Climategate breakin…”
Credibility test: I challenge you to produce evidence of a “breakin”.
RE: RoyFOMR: Nov. 10 at 4:26 pm
Seems to me the honorable course would have been to fire those who made the fallacious broadcast accusations. THEN resign.
@LazyTeenager: 4:50 pm The law is not what you want. The FOAI rejection was according to legal process so it is “by law”.
They why is there an Appeals Court? If judges cannot render decisions that are not “by law” they why are judges’ decisions overturned? Why is there a writ of certiorari?
A week ago even The Observer [from The Guardian-group newspapers] reported that the BBC were incapable of finding a female expert to talk on the subject of breast cancer. This prompted some female bloggers to do it for them and start creating a web-resource for the BBC to use in future.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/04/women-bbc-female-experts
So don’t expect to see the BBC rushing to recruit lots more PhD level scientists to write about science any time soon. [I make the assumption that they must employ at least one such person, even though it usually seems otherwise]. When I grew up the BBC actually broadcast Open University science-degree modules during the small and unfashionable hours of the day. Long gone. It’s sad.
And these are by no means the only reasons why the BBC currently gives a good impression of someone trying to reach the moon by digging multiple deep holes in the ground.
I think you can draw the conclusion from the decision that your worst fears are accurate.
Role and duties of the BBC Trust
B1.1 The Trust will monitor and hold the Executive Board to account for the BBC’s
compliance with the BBC Editorial Guidelines and other relevant codes and
guidelines.9 In particular, the Trust will do all that it can to ensure that the
accuracy and impartiality code is complied with.10
This alone surely means that the names should be revealed by law unless the impartiality code says they need not be impartial when they feel like it which did not appear in anything I read.
To have a peacetime policy of deliberate deception no matter how much you may believe in a particular cause is totally inappropriate for a public broadcaster. I accept that occasionally for short periods it might be required but not as a long term strategy and certainly not for a theory that would never stand outside scrutiny and has to be held to peer review to survive.
For our US friends not familiar with what’s currently happening at the BBC – it is in a bloodbath over child abuse, child rape, necrophilia scandal of unprecendented proportions. Sir Jimmy Savile had been a DJ / television presenter at the BBC since the 1960s. He died in 2011.
The story and rumors have been going on for decades, but lets start in early 2012.
News from the archives covering the scandal in 2012.
http://tinyurl.com/asbanm5
You are all going on about the BBC, but all of the MSM is covering AGW in exactly the same way.
A further suspect in the Team of 28 might be Prof. Brian (irrefutable) Cox – claims to be a particle physicist. Showed his true colours in lecture to the Royal TV Society on 26.11.10.
What would be illuminating would be to find out who called the meeting of the 28 in the first place.
That person, must have had the view that the BBC impartiality in climate reporting was bad and needed to be changed.
John Humphrys interviews George Entwhistle (starts @ur momisugly 1:35:00 til 1:50:00)
BBC Radio 4 Today News Programme Saturday 10Nov2012
The beef is here:-
J.H. > So you have no natural curiosity? 1:42:12
J.H. > No, the BBC has had two serious blows 1:44:42
J.H. > Not with you at all, you are entirely blameless? 1:49:14
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01nsygl/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nsygl/Today_10_11_2012/
Yes, the progressives targetted the hiring process in the media, and have subsequently stuffed the broadcasting and print outlets with fellow travellers and co-group-thinkers. They hate Murdoch, who made fortunes by resisting them. They sneer at “Faux” News, yet it runs circles around the corral that holds the lot of them.
Together with their counterparts in the “civil services” and rent-dispensing political class, they think they have the public’s finances firmly under control.
We shall see.
Not exactly. The BBC has been an unusually outspoken, incessant, and unfair cheerleader for CAGW. And its offenses are more egregious than the privately run MSM outlets like the Guardian because its charter commits it to impartiality.
I can name a few “Scientists”: Al Gore, Tony Blair and, of course, The Queen’s Family. They are all “climate experts”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20286198
This should be across the entire range of the BBC and broad sweeping changes to their science reporting./ At the moment they are a very faulty organisation, and as this shows, perhaps we could contact the BBC to show that their abeyance of standards in this area highlighted above is parallel, perhaps even causative, of the inadequacies of their perpective of climate science.
In fact, it is likely that the culture of corruption and self interest under the influence of the dominant paradigm of climate science has given rise to this culture of bias and corruption across the general culture.
The Beeb has run the same kind of anti-FOI fight before. Look up the Balen Report:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balen_Report
Their attitude is “We can use FOI to find out what we want, but nobody can use FOI against us. Our job is to gather knowledge and keep it secret, so we can use it as extortion tools to increase our budget and power.”
American media have the same attitude, but because they aren’t publicly funded it’s not quite as egregious or obvious.
phlogiston says: November 10, 2012 at 11:54 am
Was Jimmy Savile one of the 28??
————————————–
No – he sent one of his kids instead.
.
Stephen Rasey says: November 10, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Seems to me the honorable course would have been to fire those who made the fallacious broadcast accusations. THEN resign.
______________________________________
It would appear that the accusations were confused rather than fallacious. It would appear that the boy who was abused identified Sir McAlpine of Wrexham as his abuser (a location near to the children’s home), and both he and the police were under the mistaken impression that Sir McAlpine and Lord McAlpine were the same person. They are not. One was a construction company owner, the other is a Conservative peer.
Now surely this is the kind of mistake that a professional media company should have resolved, rather than jumping to stupid conclusions – conclusion that they wanted to jump to, because the BBC will do anything to denigrate the Conservatives. This is a bit like CNN trying to dig for dirt on the Republicans – it has become a corporate sport.
The BBC is no longer the professional media company or organization that it was. It has filled its ranks with liberal airheads, instead of the best and the brightest, and often simply because they were of the right minority grouping. Thus the BBC is stacked full of gays and ethnics of less than sparkling quality, who have to share the pooled brain-cell, but they have been accepted and promoted because they tick all the right boxes (except for the box marked ‘competent’). Thus the BBC has sunk from the greatest of media corporations, to perhaps the worst – and all in the name of inclusivity.
It is high time that it was put out of its misery.
.
From Christopher Booker,London Sunday Telegraph
Anyone who wants a detailed account of that BBC seminar in 2006 and its consequences for BBC coverage of climate change issues over the years that followed
might be interested in the full report I wrote a year ago for the Global Warming Policy Foundation entitled The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal, available on the GWPF website at http://gwpf.w3digital.com/content/uploads/2012/08/Booker-BBC.pdf
Jimmy and the 27 kids?
The Register quotes Helen Boaden as saying “external invitees” were “representatives from business, campaigners, NGOs, communications experts, people from the ‘front line’, scientists with contrasting views and academics”.
From those 7 categories I wonder how many were really scientific experts. Also, “scientists with contrasting views” doesn’t necessarily mean that they were on the opposite sides of the fence. Sounds like weasel wording to me with the aim of implying that there was some balance. Had there been one or more real scientists present to put forward the sceptical view, would that person or persons not have made themselves known by now?
It’s blatantly obvious that the BBC is loathe to reveal who the 28 were because that will completely undermine the basis of the agenda that has been relentlessly pursued for the past 6 years.
The BBC trustworthy? Most definitely not. All the more so when they have allocated tax payers money for the purposes of concealing their surreptitious activities. That will come back to bite them in due course.
John Marshall says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:48 am
“The BBC is in deep s–t at the moment after the disclosure of a name of a man accused of child molestation.This disclosure had no evidence on which to base it apart from the hearsay evidence from a victim. ”
Your evidence for this statement being the BBC? The Irony, in a thread about a BBC cover-up, is striking!
Try reading this for some facts… http://www.ccs-rochford.co.uk/spivey/?p=6757 you’ll have to scroll down to find Lord McAlpine, it a long list.
Are the BBC hiding behind “Twentyeightgate” because Jimmy Savile was one of their experts?
J Martin – I have instructed the Television Licensing Authority (BBC) to cancel my direct debit. I will be taking my television down the tip and will not be replacing it.
Waste of good hardware. Don’t forget that it’s perfectly legal to use the tv in the UK to watch prerecorded films such as DVDs provided you remove the external signal wire and tape or glue up the aerial or cable socket.to make it crystal clear that you don’t receive live signals.
See
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9668776/Heres-an-answer-to-the-BBC-licence-fee-dont-pay-it.html