The BBC is facing criticism for hypocrisy as a Panorama reporter, Richard Bilton, traveled 20,000 air miles to investigate climate change. The Telegraph has more.
The BBC has been accused of “rank hypocrisy” after a reporter racked up an estimated 20,000 air miles to ask why “despite all the green promises, we’re using more fossil fuels than ever before”.
London-based Richard Bilton travelled to Europe, the Middle East and the United States for an episode of BBC One’s Panorama in which he claimed “the world is saying one thing and doing another” on climate change.
Analysis by the Telegraph suggests that he could have racked up around 20,000 air miles, taking flights to Dubai, Alaska, California and Berlin for the programme, which was aired on November 13th.
At the most conservative estimate, this would have produced around 5.4 tonnes of CO₂ – more than the average person produces in a year and the equivalent to driving an average car for 18 months.
The air miles estimates are based on one scenario, which involved Mr. Bilton taking return flights from Berlin and Dubai back to London, and going from the U.K. to California and then onto Alaska before returning across the Atlantic. …
The BBC, which has pledged to reduce its operational greenhouse gas emissions by 46% by 2030, said all the flights were in economy class and were “required” for “on-the-ground reporting”.
But critics have pointed out that the corporation has local teams of reporters in each location, meaning the “one-man jolly” was “rank hypocrisy”. …
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the Conservative MP for Morley and Outwood, said: “If the BBC feels it necessary to lecture the public about fossil fuels, they should practise what they preach first.
“BBC Panorama ought to do an episode on itself, namely how its reporter is globe-trotting on flights at the licence-fee-payers’ expense.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
An art critic par excellence.
“Objets d’Arse: The Turner Prize and Trans Art 101”
As soon as I read that title I just knew I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest! 🤢 🤮
Brings to mind this:
Philip Larkin on how Charlie Parker ruined jazz – GranneBlog (granneman.com)
Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by—or so they tell me—using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously. If I sound heated on this, it’s because I love jazz, the jazz of Armstrong and Bechet and Ellington and Bessie Smith and Beiderbecke. To have it all destroyed by a paranoiac drug addict made me furious.
I quite like Charlie Parker but I think this is a hoot.
Nightingales have a reputation for being fine singers among birds and Bird’s phrasing is pretty close to what they do (can easily be discovered during walks in the night). Neither of both ever composed national anthems, though. There’s also a good bit of In the eye of the beholder in here — a passage in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward compares the diatonic jazz of the day with the sounds made by a rusty shop sign swinging in its hinges in the wind.
Indeed. Parker is popular, not so sure about some of the “modern art” mentioned above. Yoko Ono doesn’t sell many records.
“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.”― Philip Larkin
Conformity was always masquerading as rebellion in the arts. The truly subversive people are those like my friend Tim, who was the only person amongst around half a million to attend the 1970 Isle of Wight festival in a tweed sports jacket and tie.
Mildy entertaining article. But I’m starting to suspect that at least some of them are just vehicles for Israeli propaganda. Anti-anti-semitism has been the establishment religion in the so-called West for the last 100 years or so (counting from 1918 when the possibility of founding a new state of Israel became real). The present government of Israel – ignoring its past achievements wrt establishing repeat-covaxxing as world wide fashion – is still taking German money with one hand while using the other to publish mostly-substance free anti-German propaganda whose only base in fact is that recent-import Arabs in Germany are staging the same kind of public pro-palestine trantrums they staging everywhere else, too.
I realize that I don’t belong to the group of people supposed to be made to feel sympathetic for distressing damsel of the middle-east by these stories and I actually don’t. If I had any say on the matter (which I obviously don’t), the outcome would be Keine müde Mark für diesen Laden.
An absolutely brilliant demolition job. Well worth the read. Pure class.
Many thanks Steven Tucker.
Yes it’s not often we get a proper laugh on this site, claims that covid jab are ‘safe an effective’ merely raise a wry smile these days
👍👍👍
Brilliant take down of the Turner panto Steve.i went to school with a Turner winner who made some sub whale music sounds whilst keening a Scottish lament over a discordant track. She doesn’t read music or u understand and it , She sings like a pack of impaled foxes However, she expressed something about womanhood in the 21st century or whatever. . Just as Jesse Darling cobbled up some old shit ( not originally like Offili), but as long as you hate Brexit and love refugees the high heid yins of the art world will smother you in roll up money. That’s especially so if you are a dull dyke who probably gets swiped off every app and you reinvent yourself as trans. Alistair Darling could probably have produced better art from his eyebrow shavings on his deathbed than this tedious dullard. The fact that they thinks they are “like well out there” because they think what everyone at Channel 4, the Beeb, the National Trust, the rest of the fekkin permanent establishment think is well risible. The fact that a decent piece of figurative art even banging on about Windrush didn’t win against the white middle class queer an intersectional joke. Objet D’Arse indeed.
Great article. But, as stated (just), Jesse Darling is a bloke pretending to be female, right? So why use “she” and “her” all the way through? Obviously the Guardian is unable to call a spade a spade; sadly the Telegraph seems to feel it’s in the same position (all articles on gender I’ve read giving in slavishly to the subject’s demand to be referred to by misleading pronouns and adjectives); but the DS? Quick example: “Some may argue she is still busy prostituting herself today” can very easily be written thus: “Some may argue he is still busy prostituting himself today”. That wasn’t very painful! A determination to use appropriately honest language would contribute to a deligitimisation of this weird sect’s bizarre claims. Might not get far, but it would be a start.
Now that was just brilliant. Thank you!