Charles Moore has written a brilliant column in today’s Telegraph in which he responds to Nick Robinson’s peevish complaint that GB News doesn’t have to satisfy the same ‘impartiality’ requirements as the BBC. He deftly demonstrates that when it comes to trans issues, reputable media companies that shout about their ‘impartiality’ from the rooftops are uninhibited about taking the side of trans rights activists.
A small but interesting example has come my way. Over the past decade, fierce disagreements have emerged among feminists and gay activists about aspects of the trans question. While many have been happy to associate trans ideology with lesbian and gay activism, others have not, disagreeing with the idea that, as they put it, you can “get rid of biology”.
In 2019, the LGB Alliance (note the absence of the “T” from the name) was formed because of this split and is now a charity. Some of its leading lights are former trustees of Stonewall, frustrated by what they see as a refusal to discuss the issues involved.
The LGB Alliance naturally tries to advance its work with the media. One important media player is Thomson Reuters, which describes itself as “the world’s largest news and information-based tools to professionals”. Thomson Reuters has a philanthropic arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which works, it says, “to advance media freedom”, identifying disinformation and “the resulting erosion of public trust in news sources” which “undermines accurate and impartial journalism”. It is part of the Trusted News Network.
An offshoot of the Thomson Reuters Foundation is Openly, which describes itself as “a global digital platform delivering fair, accurate and impartial LGBT+ news to a world that isn’t”.
The LGB Alliance has for some time felt frustrated by the lack of coverage it receives from Openly. At the beginning of this year, Kate Harris, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, wrote to Hugo Greenhalgh, the editor of Openly, asking for a meeting to establish a better news relationship. (An earlier attempt at engagement in 2020 had failed.) Mr. Greenhalgh initially agreed to a Zoom call but then fell over a pavement slab and postponed. He then postponed again, explaining that his boss was sending him to Ukraine and that he had a lot of other things to do.
With Mr. Greenhalgh’s latter reply, the LGB Alliance also received a presumably unintended extra. It was an email to Mr. Greenhalgh from Yasir Khan, editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. It said: “AZ almost never interferes with editorial … This is more about risk reduction … Now that we’ve de-escalated and bought ourselves a bit of time, let’s … work out a plan to retain editorial independence AND manage the risk.”
“AZ” is Antonio Zappulla, the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Khan/Greenhalgh email would seem to imply that Mr. Zappulla had forbidden any meeting with the LGB Alliance, and to hint at some embarrassment in an organisation that claims to believe in editorial independence. “Risk reduction” would appear to mean how best to keep in with LGBT+ groups hostile to any contact with the LGB Alliance.
The LGB Alliance chair, Eileen Gallagher, a former managing director of London Weekend Television, knows about media. Armed with Mr. Greenhalgh’s accidental leak, she wrote to him (copied to his bosses) to ask what risk there was in a “get to know you” meeting with a charity active in the field covered by Openly. She said Mr Zappulla’s intervention to prevent it was “quite astonishing”. How could it fit with Openly’s declared mission of being “the world’s most trusted destination for impartial LGBT+ news”?
The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s final response was a letter to Ms Gallagher sent on April 25th. In it, Mr. Khan said that the LGB Alliance’s purpose of establishing a “potential news relationship” with Openly was illegitimate, because “we do not explore news relationships or news partnerships with interest groups and will not be pressured into doing so”.
As a former editor myself, I find this strange. All sensible media outlets need relationships with relevant interest groups. These are not to control news, but simply links so that information can be shared on a basis of trust. A news organisation with no such relationships would be very short of contacts and therefore of news.
Besides, Mr. Khan’s words are inconsistent with his own organisation’s behaviour. It is bound to have news relationships with various interest groups. On its website it also mentions numerous “partnerships”, including ones with several commercial companies, to help pay for the Openly platform.
I sought to discuss all this with Mr. Khan but was told he was away. My request to talk to Mr. Greenhalgh met with no response. The Thomson Reuters Foundation gave me a statement that repeated much of what Mr Khan had already said to Ms. Gallagher, adding: “The matter was escalated to the editor-in-chief and the CEO, whose responsibility is to protect the impartiality and integrity of our journalism in keeping with Foundation’s mission. It is on this basis that the CEO advised against such a meeting.”
So the CEO, who supposedly does not interfere in editorial independence, did intervene to prevent the editor seeing a bona fide group in the area on which his title reports. Where was Thomson Reuters’ foundational impartiality?
I fear this story illustrates a real difficulty. Many powerful media organisations today regard LGBT+ and some other issues, such as climate change and aspects of race, as matters about which the normal idea of impartiality is suspended. There can only be one right approach, they believe. This is clearly the attitude of Openly, which may well provide a useful service to people interested in these matters, but is emphatically not impartial, invariably following the line of LGBT+ lobbies.
So long as such organisations think this way – and that is how Nick Robinson’s own BBC thinks – projects like ‘Verify’ will be more like vigilantism against rivals than the disinterested pursuit of truth. What they see as “disinformation” will often be little more than their preferred word for attitudes they dislike or stories they wish to suppress.
Worth reading in full.
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“Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation”
I expect that’s a feature, not a bug.
Beautifully put.
Absolutely, beautifully put indeed, and all the while we’re cheating by instead shipping in all the necessities, including that which enables us to claim a supposed ‘net zero’ status (or something near it), i.e: the batteries, solar panels, windmills which are all made in the industrial nations (not to mention raping Africa and the like of its resources) who are seemingly exempted from the same political forces & agenda, at least at the moment. What happens once these industrial nations are also to comply with nonsensical net zero dictates? .. “The end of modern civilisation.” C’mon people.. this is obviously a scam whilst credible solutions such a nuclear are left to the wayside.
Net Zero won’t lead to the end of Modern Civilisation, as numerous countries such as China and India refuse to subscribe to the ideology and know that they need to continue increasing fossil fuel use to maintain their civilisation. The worst that can be said about net zero is that it will lead to the end of modern civilisation in those countries that try to achieve it.
The idea that humanity’s carbon emissions are harming the planet is obviously a delusion, but compared with religion it’s hardly the greatest mass delusion in history.
True. Maybe the end of Western Civilisation.
The difference between Net Zero and religion is arguably that the people pushing Net Zero claim they are backed by science, whereas religion is explicitly based on faith – that’s the whole point, or a large part of it.
Didn’t we all know this when we where kids?
Our human race gave up windmills and water wheels because they are just not efficient enough for a prosperous life for all the peoples on earth!
Of cause, they are perfect if you only need enough energy for the self chosen few, and you’ll have plenty of eager prolls to serve you on your new spacious,clean planet, all just for you and your billionair mates, how nice
https://www.netzerowatch.com/net-zero-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen/
When we are naked in the forest, foraging for berries, even that will ‘not be enough’ for the green totalitarians (look they will moan, you are breathing and emitting the dreaded Co2…)
“Google warns it will not provide information on claims denying that long-term trends show that the global climate is warming”. Most people on the sceptic side would not dispute that temperatures have risen since the mid 19th century following the end of the Little Ice Age.
Some may dispute that rises since the beginning of the 20th century are not as significant as claimed – due to a number of factors such as urban heat island effect, changes in measuring equipment, increased night-time temperatures, manipulation of the datasets by vested interests and so on; however, even if you acknowledge warming, the MSM and social media companies will suppress articles from people and organisations who do not believe that man-made emmissions are the primary driver of changes in climate.
The climate has warmed over the past 175 years, but claim that this is not primarily caused by anthropogenic CO2 emmissions and your views are at the mercy of the full force of state and bigtech censorship.
“Google warns…”
We’re in a war and Google are part of the enemy alliance. They are actively working to harm us.
There are options available. https://spreadprivacy.com/why-use-duckduckgo-instead-of-google/
For the Duckduckgo down voter maybe they would prefer Ecosia as an alternative search engine. Maybe they would like to try alternative browsers to Chrome with such as Brave or Vivaldi. Protonmail is alternative to GMail. Not forgetting that You Tube is owned by Googlewe can support the following where possible – Nordvpn, Bitchute, Odysee and Rumble.
Perfectly written summary. I’ll copy that for future use myself. Google of course now are a regime mouthpiece whose main aim is to collude with government agencies like the CIA to convince ppl of things which are untrue.
I missed the MSM from the list of perps. The BBC, for example, is an utter disgrace on the CO2 / climate change narrative. This blog post from 2014 is quite nostalgic; most of the comments are interesting too.
https://biasedbbc.tv/blog/2014/04/20/that-settled-science-bbcs-approach-ignorant-and-medieval-to-debate/
The BBC is an utter disgrace.
Idem on excess deaths. Poor old Evan Davies gave it a tentative try last night on PM, gone again by this morning.
“The climate has warmed over the past 175 years”
I think it has warmed since about 1600. In fact, a multi-pronged question I ask those who buy the man-made climate catastrophe narrative is as follows: how much has the earth’s temperature risen since the 1850s (i.e. post industrialisation)? To which I answer “around 1.1C” and they argue that this is mainly due to man-made emissions. Then I ask: how much did the earth warm from 1600 to 1850? To which I answer “1.0C”. Then I ask – and what was this increase caused by? To which the answer is … silence, of course.
Jordan Peterson did a long interview with Richard Lindzen recently, from which this quote might derive.
Reading his Ivy League credentials took him almost 5 minutes.
I just wonder where these people have been over the last decade.
If they had opened their mouths earlier, this enormous public brainwash and its resulting disastrous policies might have been prevented.
Lindzen has been opposing this a long while, avd Peterson has always been opposed to net zero when questioned.
Lindzen has been active in the climate realist movement for thirty years or more.
The fact that you seem unaware of that, suggests that you have only just woken up.
All part of the plan to usher in a new era of technological feudalism. Your WEF appointed digital overlords will have you tagged and assigned to your local prefecture in due course.
An excellent article, these econuts do not realise that everything we touch or need in todays society has been made from, with, or by fossil fuels, cloths, food, housing everything. The UK will replace fossil fuel generated electricity with solar and wind turbines made with fossil fuels, and these methods will be imported by shipping methods using fossil fuels, installed on foundations created with machinery and materials, made with the use of and by fossil fuels…………….Lemmings off a cliff comes to mind.
spot on …
Time to release the real Kraken: Nikola Tesla’s free energy devices. And LENR.
At the root of this is a utopian desire for a depopulated world where the super-rich do what they want and everyone else is a slave class. In essence, the Net Zero mob wants Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, even down to the workers physically producing the power they use to live!
We are hearing all the time about the risk of fossil fuels, but we never hear about the risk of NO FOSSIL FUELS. That risk far outweighs the use of fossil fuels —— Coal Oil and Gas are what empowers the world. 90% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, and along with Nuclear are the only form of ON DEMAND energy. They are what has doubled life expectancy, freed up people from a miserable life of back breaking labour and has given us the lifestyle we now enjoy, with warm homes, labour saving appliances, leisure time, holidays, computers, television, cars and infact everything that can be associated with modern civilisation. ——— NET ZERO policies that want to eliminate fossil fuels because the use of them causes CO2 emissions were never put to the public. No MP asked a single question as to the cost/benefit of this ideologically motivated nonsense that will impoverish people. Politicians and bureaucrats actually have no idea whatsoever how any of this can possibly be achieved and many would have great difficulty in explaining to a bunch of primary school children the so called “science” that they hide behind. Far from destroying the world, fossil fuels make the world a far more liveable and hospitable place. Without them we are in the Middle Ages. The apocalypse will come from getting rid of fossil fuels, not by their use.
An excellent paper, well worth reading. It certainly shows, if we needed any further evidence, than the Net Zero crowd are barking mad.
It is worth noting that a lot of sceptical climate science comes from retired but well qualified scientists. Could this be because those still in employment are scared of losing their position or grant should they criticise the eco-madness of anthropogenic climate change?
There is nothing here that has not been said before. The problem is that the politicians, encouraged by celebrities and school children, refuse to accept it. Why?
What is most important is free speech so we can debate the issue without being censored, demonized and smeared.
First create the utopian ‘Green’ economy and environment and then, if it’s so great, people will choose to move from fossil fuels.
But first create the ‘Green’ option.
“A damning indictment of the Net Zero political project has been made by one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists.”
The man is a nuclear physicist. Precisely. No chance whatsoever of conflicts of interest here, right? No chance that at some point he got to hate Greenpeace so much that he became a rabid anti-climate change politicised activist, right?
From the abstract of his paper:
“Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcing is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate.”
Here is a graph of radiative forcings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#/media/File:Physical_Drivers_of_climate_change.svg
They aren’t what he is saying at all. He is straight-out lying about the science in his so-called “paper”, written for a “private for-profit organization”, by their own admission. Not an academic institution.
And if you wanted to know about the science of climate change, there is no shortage of correct information on the Internet, written in actual peer-reviewed academic journals. Or the popular versions of them, if you don’t have the level of education needed for a proper academic paper.
You could begin by learning that the greenhouse effect was discovered by 19th century physicists. Yes, you read 19th century correctly.
That’s because in the 19th century, people didn’t have the Internet or video, so they were much better educated and informed on average. The Internet and videos don’t help you be better informed, they feed your addiction for rubbish that will erase things from your memory and make you stupid.