Though he claims to have reported on Climategate fairly, Roger Harrabin seems to have been paid to promote alarmism at the Beeb.
The Mail on Sunday reports,
A senior BBC journalist accepted £15,000 in grants from the university at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ scandal – and later went on to cover the story without declaring an interest to viewers.
Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’, used the money from the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to fund an ‘ad hoc’ partnership he ran with a friend.
We spotlight this because in his Sunday Telegraph column, Christopher Booker writes,
Some years back, the BBC adopted a new editorial policy –that the scientific and political “consensus” on climate change was now so overwhelming that it should be actively promoted, while climate sceptics, or “deniers” as the BBC calls them, should be kept off the airwaves.
A key moment in developing the new party line was a “high-level seminar” in 2006, attended by a bevy of top BBC executives. It was organised by Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents, and Dr Joe Smith, a geographer and climate activist from the Open University. They had set up the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme to promote the consensus line on global warming, funded by, among others, the Department for the Environment (then in charge of government policy on climate change) and WWF, one of the leading warmist pressure groups. [Emphasis added]
The headline is unchanged. The news story is still there.
And “Skeptical Science” is anything but.
MF,
There was nothing wrong with the headline. It says
“BBC’s Mr Climate Change accepted £15,000 in grants …”
from which it is clear that it’s not money for him personally, but a grant for his activist seminars.
It did a disappearing act because they must have realized it was misleading and possibly libelous—or at least the headline was, which is apparently all that anyone bothered to read. The reality, as was made clear even in the Mail’s story (though at the bottom), is that Harrabin was not himself paid anything. He headed a conference series that got funding from East Anglia (years before Climategate). Should we then say the Wall Street Journal is crap because Shell sponsors this: http://economics.wsj.com? No, we shouldn’t–it’s a good paper. And a fair review of Harrabin’s work shows he’s a good reporter. Have fun with your non-story.
I see the Daily Mail piece did a disappearing act.
The physics of climate change doesn’t care about graf, wealth of the carbon industry, denial of climate change. Its not even about belief. Its co2 doing what co2 does with certain frequencies of infrared. Plain and simple.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/how-to-avoid-the-truth-about-climate-change.html
A shift will be coming soon to the conservatives from within their own ranks. Something that the Koch brothers can’t control. Republicans confirming climate science is the real deal and we need to do something about it.
In the mean time enjoy your Junk Science as though it is reality.
Only £15,000?
The guy’s an amateur…I thought the BBC’s policy on wasting taxpayers’ money was a 100k minimum spend. 15k is the annual taxi bill for some BBC execs’ , isn’t it?
Follow the money