When GB News asked Ofcom to confirm that debates on biological sex are now ‘settled’ following the Supreme Court ruling, incredibly it replied ‘no’. Yet it deems the Net Zero debate to be settled? We’re through the looking glass now, says Toby in the Spectator. Here’s an excerpt.
Earlier this week, GB News again found itself at odds with Ofcom. The channel had written to the broadcast regulator asking if, in light of the Supreme Court judgment affirming that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex, it could now treat the dispute between trans-rights activists and gender-critical feminists as a “settled” matter. “Broadly settled” was the phrase Ofcom applied to the “theory of anthropogenic global warming” in a guidance note issued in 2013 stating that broadcasters were no longer under an obligation to be impartial when discussing the issue. GB News wanted to know whether the regulator would extend the same latitude to debates about sex- and gender-based rights.
Incredibly, Ofcom’s answer was ‘no’. Indeed, it described GB News’s view that the word ‘woman’ should be defined in reference to biological sex – and that it was acceptable to refer to athletes by their biological pronouns – as “dogmatic propositions”. Such editorial judgements, it said, “require nuanced decision-making”.
So, to be clear, the regulator thinks the view that man-made carbon emissions are causing global warming is so scientifically robust that broadcasters are under no obligation to present alternative opinions, but the notion that sex is binary, immutable and biological is so contentious that if GB News interviews some heretic who thinks trans women aren’t women it has to interview someone alongside them who thinks they are. Presumably, that means if the channel interviews, say, Sharron Davies on why women should not have to compete against trans-identifying men in swimming competitions, it should also feature a bloke with a beard who identifies as a woman making the opposite case. Oh, and if a GB News presenter refers to said bloke as ‘he/him’ rather than ‘she/her’, he could complain to Ofcom and it would likely be upheld.
We’re through the looking-glass in which television viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. This decision is bizarre, not least because, among scientists, the claim that carbon emissions have caused the average global temperature to rise over the past 150 years is far from “settled”. Ofcom’s decision may have been influenced by the infamous 2013 paper which claimed 97% of climate scientists agree that “climate change is real, man-made and dangerous”, to quote Barack Obama. But that paper itself is highly contested, with an army of climate sceptics lining up to debunk it.
My go-to document to disprove the ‘settled science’ claim is the World Climate Declaration, signed by almost 2,000 scientists, which points out that natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming, the growth in average global temperatures is slower than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that CO2 is not a pollutant but essential to life on Earth, and that global warming is not causing more intense hurricanes, floods, droughts, etc. In short, the notion of a ‘climate emergency’ is bunkum.
Worth reading in full.
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Is it still ‘Mother Earth’ these days, or have we moved on to another name?
Being very cynical as well as sceptical, i always start by following the money. For example, SEN = extra grants for schools; climate change = research money for unemployable academics. Where is the cash in the transgender debate (apart from a few sports winnings, which will be declining)? And how do I get my hands on some of it, apart from playing real tennis in a pink frock?
I’m amazed they still refer to ships as female, especially the embarressingly woketastic Royal Navy. Surely for any new ship they’d have to think of a unisex name and follow it with “God bless they/them and all who sail in they/them”.😐
God???
They’d probably say “all deities, tree spirits and extra terrestrial beings bless ze”.
Insh Allah more likely.
Biological fact and real science – Ofcom ‘No’.
ClimateCon, Green Nazism, Green fraud & corruption, Green Communism – Ofcom ‘well of course, it is settled’
End Ofcom.
Make Thinking Great Again.
Ofcom is not fit for purpose its subject to regulatory capture, staffed clearly by woke zealots, and probably always was!
Needs scrapping, and soon.
Its also effectively defying a Supreme Court judgement – another organisation that needs to be scrapped – that creature of Blair.
OFCOM and science are poles apart. It is a politically driven body with a remit now for censorship and control.
It’s all quite straight forward…
BBC:
Jimmy Savile is a top DJ with an unblemished reputation
The vaccines are safe and effective
the world is boiling due to man’s C02 emmissions
Anybody slightly to the right of Jeremy Corbyn is an unhinged right wing bastard and should be locked up.
Ofcom – all of the above is tickety-boo and all executives in the BBC are purer than the driven snow.
GB News:
There are only 2 sexes as per the Supreme Court ruling.
There has been widespread sexual abuse of young girls by predominantly asian men
The primary driver of the climate is not man’s C02 emmissions.
Ofcom – if you continue to repeat such blatant and scurrilous untruths, we will fine you into oblivion.
So, GB News presenters should be metaphorically burned at the stake as heretics.
The era of the New Inquisition is here.
Hopefully it won’t be centuries until the New Age of Enlghtenment arrives.
They probably also believe Ukraine is just weeks from victory.
Off topic but relevant if we generalise lies told by the establishment and their bureaucratic machinery to the citizens of our once great but now third world country.
Paul Weston on the r@p€y gangs.
https://youtu.be/OvbbB4nZldE?si=i-bjLPasHcufM0g8
OfCom should not have an opinion about these matters. Its role is to supervise broadcasters, etc not to fix opinions or editorial policy.
or it should be.
It was founded to manage the broadcast spectrum.
One of the many things I find depressing and shocking is the number of people I speak to who just accept that we (well, it’s usually other people, in their minds) need to be nannied and protected from content that we should not be seeing.
As this keeps being repeated, people will remember it when asked about the topic and will then produce the correpsonding lines from memory they honestly believe to be their own thoughts. That’s the basic idea behind any kind of marketing: Make it an ubiquitous background appearance to program it into people’s memory.
What I would find depressing were I to be depressed by something like this is that this is a universal phenomenon. Some people think that claims that woman is a biological category must not be made. Some other people think that expressing support for enemies of Israel must not be allowed. Both routinely claim they value freedom of speech. But only ever their own speech.
Indeed.
It’s good that you’re not depressed by things like this.
It should be limited to regulating the spectrum and other technical matters. I don’t believe that broadcast content should be limited in any way by the state or any state-aligned quango. All radios, TVs, phones, laptops etc that I have ever seen have controls that allow the user to adjust the volume, channel or to switch it off. Anyone not living under a rock has a fair idea what they are likely to see on a given channel. Caveat emptor.
All seems a bit off to me.
🤣 Great, I say. Give them enough rope to hang themselves!
You sound like a far right conspiracy theorist!
On temperature: go to AI and ask it if an intensive property can be added. Answer No
Then ask it if it can be divided: Answer No.
Then ask it if temperature is an intensive property. Answer Yes.
Ergo there is no such thing as average temperature, Just some sort of statistic.
Think of it this way: if you add 2 kg to 3kg you get 5kg. If you add 20C to 30C you don’t get 50C. You’d get a median temperature based on the volumes and thermodynamic properties of what you were mixing.
And thermometers don’t measure such things. Eg: Try mixing a litre of water at 20C with 40 litres of air at 30C. Good luck!
You will get AI to admit such, but it segues, deflects and dissembles first, trying to avoid telling the truth. Like all climate activists.
Surely this not what Ofcom is supposed to be. They are now just a political, censorship bunch of opinionated pratts.
Broadcast content has been regulated by the state since Day 1.
Cameron apparently said Ofcom would have a strictly technical role under a Tory government – that didn’t happen. But he also said that their other roles would be taken directly under the control of the DCMS. So he didn’t really believe in freedom of speech – he just wanted to make sure it was him that directly controlled what speech was acceptable.