If the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, which is reviewing the Corporation’s coverage of climate change, wants a good example of bias, it should take a look at the BBC’s report of recent floods in Pakistan, which was published earlier this month.
Headlined 'Devastation on repeat: How climate change is worsening Pakistan's deadly floods', it is a classic example of BBC bias, misinformation and downright inaccuracy. It began:
Every year, monsoon season brings deadly floods in Pakistan.
This year it began in late June, and within three months, floods had killed more than 1,000 people. At least 6.9 million were affected, according to the United Nations agency for humanitarian affairs, OCHA.
The South Asian nation is struggling with the devastating consequences of climate change, despite emitting just 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
To witness its effects, the BBC travelled from the mountains of the north to the plains of the south for three months. In every province, climate change was having a different impact.
In true BBC fashion, the report offers no data or evidence to support the claim that floods are getting worse in the country or that climate change is responsible even if they are. Instead, the rest of the story consists of interviews with people who have been impacted.
Sad though their stories are, the BBC seems to live in a fantasy land where floods never used to happen before climate change. The reality is that Pakistan’s summer monsoon, which accounts for most
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The BBC doesn’t understand that, since Pakistan has been an independent, self-governing country for almost 80 years, we are not responsible for it. They have made their own laws; spend their own money …. and the fact that a majority in the country are poor and it is completely dysfunctional is THEIR fault, not ours.
It has benefited from considerable Aid from the UK throughout the 80 years of independence and squandered the lot.
Instead, the rest of the story consists of interviews with people who have been impacted.
This is standard practice in the legacy media. Virtually everything they cover is lightweight personality based instead of proper analysis. A factual exploration of Brexit and the Single Market was gone as soon as the lying oaf Johnson became the Leave campaign front man – manner from heaven to the legacy media. Early in the Ukraine was there was coverage of how the poor Ukrainian people had to pick their way over a destroyed bridge that was making their lives so hard. No mention of the significance of the destruction of bridge in that early Russian advance towards Kiev.
A 400% population increase since the 1960s, and the resulting deforestation and demand for forest free land, might have something to do with it?
As ever, nothing to do with man-made climate change, everything to do with natural variability and man-made landscape change.
When it comes to climate reporting, the BBC is now virtually ‘fact free’.