A Place to Stand

  Bishop Hill points to this article from Jo Nova comparing how the BBC, who have a legal legal requirement of "due balance" balanced their accounts of climategate and hackgate.

    It will come as an enormous surprise to anybody who thinks the BBC is a news organisation rather than a state propaganda one that their behaviour differed 180 degrees. For hackgate the BBC were straight off the ball reporting so fast that they didn't have time to even check with Heartland and find that the main document was a forgery. On climategate they simply didn't report the actual subject at all, simply that the CRU had been hacked, something for which there is no evidence whatsoever even yet. It is considerably more probable that it was leaked from somebody inside , disgusted at the way CRU was refusing to respect the FoI law. The first BBC story was not about Climategate, but about a possibly mythical “hacking”.

So when did the BBC report the emails? Short answer: I don’t know. Did they? (Can anyone find a story where they did? I can’t, but it’s a big site).
The big concession from the BBC was that one early news item (Mon Nov 23rd 2009, by nameless at the BBC) actually does quote one single Climategate email — though prepacked with the response from Phil Jones both before the email, and after it, lest anyone read it “uninoculated” and think for one second that scientists really ought not be using tricks to hide declines. The subheader above this devastating email is, wait for it, “Globally Respected”. That’s something science journalists at the BBC most surely will not be when the public realizes they’ve been carefully spoonfed only half the story.
The original BBC “News” item still headlines it as a “hack”, calls the person who released the emails an “offender”. It did not mention that it might have been a legal leak by a whistleblower, or that some of the emails were subject to FOI anyway, and all of the emails were work related emails funded by taxpayers. So the BBC didn’t report on ClimateGate, and they didn’t get much about that other “hacking” story right either.
When the BBC talks about the damage to science, they discuss how science is ‘damaged’ by leaked emails but not how science is damaged by scientists who hide declines…
It’s what they don’t say that advertises their bias.
At the same time as ClimateGate was running hot, Richard Black wrote a story about the mysterious lack of female skeptics, and he referred to me vaguely, but wouldn’t name me, link to me, or write and ask my opinion. Not too hot on the research eh Richard? I had the answer he wasn’t looking for: Why don’t women want to face global bullies? I can’t imagine…
When ClimateGate II broke, Black was fast — fast to do damage control for his favorite pet theory. See ClimateGate II: Handy Guide to spot whitewash journalism – The top 10 excuses for scientists behaving badly.
Always remember, in the handy-guide to journalist-spotting: Real journalists reort what happened and PR agents cover up what happened.

  However I also spotted how the BBC had  gone yet a further step beyond mere total bias to iinventive propaganda. They had invented a brand new name for the Heartlnad hacking - "Deniergate" - and claimed, falsely, that this was being used commonly across the blogsphere.. Obviously it failed to report, then or later, that the "deniers" had done nothing scandalous as the real scandal was that their pal had fabricated the important part of the "evidence".

I commented:

Though Black did write “”Denier-gate” is the label being applied in the blogosphere” but that is certainly not fully true and may be a deliberate lie.
When I read it I googled the term and found no mentions which clearly predated his own so it was certainly not generally applied across the blogsphere.
I did email the BBC asking for confirmation of which blogs he had seen it on but the BBC have decided not to reply.
I think it quite possible he invented the term and claimed it as general. This is not as unusual a tactic as it may seem as it adds non-existent public support to the journalists story. Hence, for example, the media insisted Milosevic was popularly known as the “Butcher of Belgrade” despite there being no fighting in Belgrade, him actually killing nobody (as proven in his “trial”) and the term only working in English. A similar example is the “Glasgow kiss” (headbutt) which appeared first in a newspaper article which claimed it was inn common usage & now IS in common usage.
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Of course it is always possible that the BBC will indeed , belatedly, reply to the emial stating which blogsites had used the term "deniergate" before they did.

Indeed if the BBC is in any way whatsoever an honest organisation they will be able to and will wish to.

I am willi8ng to take betsw that the BBCis not, ionn the most minisclue degree, honest  and that nobody working for it believes it is. If there is anybody at all in the entire orgasnisation who thinks he/she works for an uncorrupt news organisation rather than a wholly dishonest, fascist propaganda organisation they will certainly wish to defend its good name by pointing out what facts Richard Black's calaim was based on. I will, of course, publish such a reply - nobody can accuse me of not being infinitely more honest than the entire BBC.