Manufacturing Environmental Consensus with the BBC

I am a news watcher, it's true- and I watch far more than I comment. So, I have this little antenna grown out of experience that in some media areas night follows day- and in my experience never is this truer than with the BBC's environmental agenda. The awesomely consistent BBC takes every possible cue from nature to discuss GLOBAL WARMING- this wonderful post-communist magic schtick with which to harrass the evil capitalist kulak scum.

So, no sooner can you say 'flood'ˇand 'drought' than you will find the Beeb ruminating its favourite unfalsifiable 'news' story.

And what's worst is the pious tone of 'we don't know but we think it's only safe to ram it down your throats' that they use.

It's so medieval, this fixation with signs and wonders, this attempt to build significance out of every jot and tittle of nature's revelation.

And, if nature doesn't suggest it in a medievalist's dream headline form, they'll go looking for it. And, like any of your medieval scholars you care to mention, they'll get their facts wrong.

The environment... ah, so poignant, so pictorial, telegenic eeeven.

And a great way to bash Bush!!!

How on earth the Beeb thought to replace the elastic minded and high minded Alistair Cooke with a Liberal consensus man like Harold Evans I don't know.

But anyway, here's a great debunking of the manufactured (Beeb-authorised) consensus about Bush and science. (thanks to The Ablution and A Tangled Web)

Apologia... blah blah

Of course, saying all this risks making one seem terribly reactionary and closed minded, since where science pushes, we're supposed to give- but, well, yes, I am closed-minded to medievalist tripe when presented looking, smelling and tasting like medievalist tripe, with the same intentions largely that inspired that medievalist tripe ie. reinforcing an orthodoxy deemed beneficial for the public mind by the self-appointed custodians of the public mind. Besides which, as the Harold Evans article makes clear, it's really the ivory tower brigade who are upset, and it's well known they're a project the Left in the States has been working on these last few decades (in Britain the battle was over much earlier). Of course I believe in answering environment problems with science (though to me that has generally meant coastal defences versus groynes versus marshland areas etc etc, or similar direct and verifiable arguments), but this push 'n' pull argument stretching a wafer thin cause and effect scenario over global distances is really All About Oil- and the Left's agenda with it.