Towards the end of last year, Laura Dodsworth and I complained to Ofcom about a collaboration between Sky U.K. and the Behavioural Insights Team – then part-owned by the Cabinet Office – to use “behavioural science principles”, including subliminal messaging, to encourage viewers to endorse and comply with the Government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda. That is, Sky bragged about joining forces with a unit that was part-owned by the U.K. Government to use covert psychological techniques to try to persuade viewers to endorse one of the U.K. Government’s most politically contentious policies – and encouraged other broadcasters to do the same! Alarmingly, the joint report by Sky and the BIT also recommended broadcasters utilise these same covert techniques to change the behaviour of children “because of the important influence they have on the attitude and behaviours of their parents”.
In our complaint, Laura and I argued this was a breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting code – in particular, paragraph 11 of section two, entitled ‘Harm and Offence’:
Broadcasters must not use techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred.
Now, two months later, Ofcom has replied, effectively dismissing the complaint. You can read the full reply beneath our original complaint here, but this is the gist of it:
In the Guidance we outline that, among other things, whether an issue has “been broadly settled […] and whether the issue has already been scientifically established” should inform a broadcaster’s consideration of whether the special impartiality requirements in the Code apply to a particular issue. In our Guidance, we identify the scientific principles behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming as an example of an issue which we considered to be broadly settled. On this basis, we do not consider these principles in themselves to be matters of political or industrial controversy for the purposes of Section Five of our Code.
In other words, using covert psychological methods to persuade viewers to endorse climate change dogma and adapt their behaviour accordingly, e.g. switch to electric cars, is not a breach of the Broadcasting Code because the science of anthropogenic global warming is “broadly settled” and “scientifically established”.
What about the fact that many of the behavioural changes Sky is trying to persuade viewers to make also happen to be changes the current Government is promoting under the banner of ‘Net Zero’? On that point, Ofcom is slightly more ambivalent, leaving the door open to another complaint:
The U.K. Government’s position on net zero covers a wide range of policy areas around which there may be a degree of controversy. Policies on how governments deal with crises or controversies in general can be a “matter or major matter of political controversy or relating to current public policy”, even if the U.K. Government has a settled policy position on it. It is possible, depending on the specific content and context, that a broadcast programme containing discussion of specific net zero policy decisions by the UK Government may engage Section Five of the Code, and require consideration under the special impartiality rules.
Ofcom goes on to say that it has raised our complaint with Sky, but has been assured by Sky’s response, and for that reason, among others, won’t be taking our complaint any further:
Turning to your complaint, you did not identify any specific programmes broadcast by Sky which you considered to be in breach of the Code. As I have explained, Ofcom is a post-transmission broadcast regulator and as such, does not usually consider general complaints about a broadcaster’s policies. On this occasion, we drew Sky’s attention to your complaint. Sky has assured us that they retain full control of all editorial broadcast content on their channels, and they are aware of their obligations under the Code.
It is also important to note that, broadcasters have the editorial freedom to analyse, discuss and challenge issues across the board, including topics related to net zero policies. As set out above, a broadcaster’s right to freedom of expression can only be subject to restrictions which are in pursuit of legitimate aims, in accordance with the law, necessary, and proportionate. We must exercise our regulatory functions in a way which is compatible with those rights, and in line with our regulatory principles.
For these reasons, in light of the assurances given by Sky, and in the absence of a complaint about specific broadcast content, there are no grounds for opening an investigation into Sky’s editorial policies and general organisational strategy related to net zero carbon emissions under the Code.
Accordingly, we will not be taking any further action in relation to the general matters which you raised with us about Sky. However, if you do wish to make a complaint about a specific programme that you consider raises issues under the Code, then you can do this by submitting a complaint on Ofcom’s website.
Disappointingly, at no point does Ofcom address our concern about Sky’s use of covert psychological techniques to prosecute its green agenda or its intention to use these methods to bend the minds of children.
Needless to say, Laura and I have no intention of letting the matter drop. If you see a programme on Sky that you think uses covert psychological methods to brainwash you (or your children) into accepting ‘Net Zero’ gobbledegook please bring it to our attention by emailing us here.
You can subscribe to Laura’s Substack newsletter here.
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No real comment needed, nevertheless – do these people have any ability to realise how transparent they are? The establishment is merrily stripping itself naked without any insight into the fact it is doing this!
They are laughing in our faces! “We can now do whatever we like and you can do nothing about it”
Truth is dead and tyranny is on the move
Johnson’s bluster over the Ukraine and Russia is the biggest stream of lies and guff heard from a dispatch box in decades – they all cheer him on! The classic and transparent : “Foreign war diversion from growing tyranny at home”( only problem according to those on the ground is that the Russians have not set one foot in the self-proclaimed Eastern Republics and will no do so unless they are attacked by Ukrainian forces)..
Now Starmer yet again wants to shut down RT so the plebs don’t find out the alternative truth about the Ukraine! Have his Trilateral Commission chums been twisting his arm?
Must have been like this in the Reichstag sessions during the thirties!
Think about the bluster and noise. If it was real there would be 2 options; a) push the button and hope it gives advantage, b) negotiate, let Russia have part of Ukraine and in exchange move more Nato into the remaining East European countries, grow European military strength and make it impossible for Russia to expand further. Because we also feel threatened. There is a 3rd option which should’ve been done after the Soviet collapse – help them, make them friends. I am sure Russia would, in the right circumstances prefer to be aligned with Europe than China. There is more in common culturally and Europe is less of a threat ultimately.
Of course it might all be part of the globalist game and the outcome is already decided.
And what the fuck did you expect?
“I’ll write a strongly worded letter that’ll have them shitting thier pants and changing their editorial basis overnight.”
Grow up.
Their
Love it that you corrected the grammar and left the ‘profanity’ in place.
Gawd forbid I should be taken as an oik.
OFCOM was established by our puppet government to give merely the illusion of people power. Its inexplicable decisions over the years, together with its tortuous reasoning, show it to be yet another globalist gatekeeper.
Met Police derisively dismiss mountains of evidence on vaccine damage as “Nothing to see here” and Ofcom dismiss complaint about the blatant brainwashing use of covert psy-ops techniques to terrify and confuse the population.
I think we can see where this leads. There is now not one National Institution left that the people can trust to be on their side and look after their interests and welfare.
We are on our own – the Long Blair March through the Institutions and the ‘occupation’ of every instrument of Power supposed to defend our democracy with a ‘duty of care’ is now complete and the total alienation of the mass of the governed from the Governing Elite is achieved
When they force their ‘Bill of Rights’ ( sic) and ‘On Line Harms’ Bills through a cowed Parliament, they will have total power over us and Johnson can dress-up as Trudeau whenever he pleases!
Johnson still has his ‘Emergency Powers’ and can exercise them without responsibility at will and with the help and encouragement of the Starmer ‘Opposition'( sic).
Game over for Parliamentary Democracy under the Rule of Law applied equally of all.
I agree. What I’m clinging to now is that they overplay their hand and even the inattentive notice the demolition around them.
But I’m not holding my breath. A colleague at work today was talking to me about the jabs for 5-11 year olds. He has a 7 year old. I suggested he avoid it. He admitted he would only consider it IF THEY WERE GOING ON HOLIDAY.
Zero critical thinking. Zero concern about freedom. Freedom to him is at most what he needs to do to get into a foreign country. The hassle of a vaccine passport not its implications for liberty. That’s what we are up against.
I’m afraid that the idea of freedom as a right, to live and do as you wish, within the bounds of laws enacted by common consent, is as dead as a dodo. It is, to me, rather more than not wearing a suit and tie to the office. It’s ironic that a country which spends so much time, words and effort dredging up everything to do with slavery two centuries and more past, is, metaphorically, putting on and securing its own gyves and slave collars as I write.
I worked in advertising for many years, and subliminal advertising via screens (cinema, TV) was a hot topic about 30 years ago, and, if memory serves, was forbidden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMv1G99AeqI
Unfortunately freedom is only ever won with blood. At the moment we are too comfortable worrying about being nice to non-binary gender identities.
https://thecovidblog.com/2021/07/08/maddie-de-garay-ohio-13-year-old-cannot-and-did-not-consent-to-vaccine-clinical-trials/
They’re not inattentive. They are so subconsciously scared that they have stuck their heads in the sand. Because they cannot control their fear is why they like to walk round with pants on their faces.
I don’t want to be offensive about your colleague – but how can possible damage to your child’s health disappear if a holiday beckons?
What does loving your child mean?
Excellent post David. Great summary.
Brilliant strategy. Use their own guidelines to skewer them for breaking their own guidelines. What could possibly go wrong.
The only hope is for media outlets that have not been captured by the prevailing dogmas, such as GB News, or Fox News in the US, to grow and provide a counterweight, and the for non-legacy outlets like Rogan’s podcast, provided of course they survive cancellation. If the media, political opposition and virtually every major firm (banks, social media and tech platforms, advertisers) have been captured, the prevailing dogma is hard to counter. I doubt there’s any mileage in trying to force existing broadcasters to be more impartial.
GBNews and Fox are only half-awake – which is why they are allowed to operate.
Well Tucker Carlson is a strong voice, and I would not call Neil Oliver “half awake”. Not perfect, but better than nothing. At least in the US, Fox is mainstream. In the UK all the legacy media are on more or less the same page.
GB News has 406k subscribers on YT – Russel Brand has over 5 million.
I left Russel on the left a good few years ago but he has been crawling back over to the middle/right ever since it seems and puts out pretty good stuff constantly at the moment.
GB broadcast outside of YT so maybe the view count is a lot higher than the 406k would suggest. It’s not over yet, but I fear it might be soon.
It might actually be good for TPTB to completely lose it and show their true colors, similarly to how they are being shouted down on NetZero by more and more people as it hits their wallets. A few years of pain under Labour should do the trick.
When are bank staff going to twig that CBDC will end their employment?
Whilst I deprecate everything that OFCOM have said, given their stress on the post broadcast nature of their analysis, perhaps what is needed is to provide specific examples of where this has happened and take them through itstep by step.
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Everyone I know dismisses EVERYTHING on the BBC as propaganda
Sky just laid off 1,500 installation engineers
Tells you all you need
Ofgem is irrelevant other than as an echo chamber for the out of touch elites
Reminder: there is a legal precedent for “I only did the propaganda” not being a defence to a charge of crimes against humanity. (Julius Streicher.)
Anyone else feel nauseous watching the BBC’s latest self promotion propaganda short film?
I and my husband along with,I suspect, several million other people.
Many thanks to both Toby and Laura for putting OFCOM and SKY on notice.
I disagree with a view this is futile resistance. The only worse thing than a (largely) dismissive response is that no one objects at all to their BS.
Grudgingly – I would concede they have a point that they are there to adjudicate on the rules being applied to broadcast material, not broadcasters virtue-signalling puffery.
I also think that SKY will look more stupid when they do get called out for broadcasting something silly given they have been put on notice this way.
Oh, I see…once the science is ‘settled’ (which true science never is) then you can use any propaganda and psychological tactics you like.
Music to the ears of the BBC, who kept telling us that the science was settled.
But this is very bad for science. The science and its outworkings will end up settled in error and increasingly confirmed in it.
Ofcom are not fit for purpose and have become nothing but a tool to enforce propaganda.
It’s all propaganda. How can the science be settled when it’s based on models? Models? Sorry. This isn’t really science in the true sense of it. The real test of the hypothesis won’t come until all these scientists have cashed their checks and collected their retirement and there will be no one to hold accountable if they are wrong. Maybe they’re right? We will never know. As to consensus, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in the early 1970s and describes consensus science. Of course, no one will ever learn that the consensus is falling apart, because the media is too busy brainwashing.
Ofcom are a bunch of cunts and wankers and can fuck off!
The best way to avoid Sky brainwashing is not to watch it. Same applies to the BBC.
After years of being fobbed off by the BBCs Complaints Unit I submitted a FoI request to discover, over the previous 5 years, how many complaints received and how many upheld. After a prolonged battle taking 12 months and involving my MP, the BBC DG, the BBC threatening me with the full legal costs, they caved and told me that of 1.25 Million complaints received they upheld a paltry 0.014%.
OFCOM are cut from the same cloth, wholly woke and totally unaccountable.
Don’t waste your time, just use the LS platform to expose them.
The one and only good thing that will come from making a complaint to Ofcom or any other regulatory agency is that there will be a record left that government officials, apparatchiks and MPs were not ignorant of what was happening at this time.
Any complaint that might hinder Klaus Schwab’s’ Great Reset will be ignored by his minions in Ofcom, and right on up to 10 Downing St.
Climate Change is very important to the Great Reset, it’s the vehicle on which Schwab intends making the UN his personal army. All those that have lapped up the climate change lie have had it pumped into them that one country alone, or countries working separately, will not be able to save the planet from environmental destruction.
Thus, these people believe that a global effort has to be made, or the earth will boil or melt – the morons don’t seem to be sure which it will be (if the amount of acreage burned in wildfires each year goes up, it’s bad; and if it goes down, it’s bad!).
This global effort will need a global overseer and the United Nations have been earmarked for this role. This is why climate change is top of the agenda with the UN. Both political and everyday progressives (Sky news/BBC) will applaud the UN being made a global policeman (at least outside of China).
Under the guise of reversing climate change the UN will, step by step, override sovereign government’s authority over their countries and citizens. Both political and everyday progressives will also applaud this.
Schwab’s and Soros’ ultimate aim for the UN is that it becomes their One World Government’s private army. To make the UN a global arm, the United States’ military arsenal will be commandeered. Soros’ is on record as having said that in the New World order the US will not be a superpower.
The plan is that the UN, in its new role as a Globalist Army, will take control of the US military – including the nuclear arsenal. Likewise, in all other Western countries, their military arsenals are earmarked to be handed over to the UN when it assumes its new role.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are touted as future UK PMs! Look at these pair of cretins? They’d see nothing but goodness in signing over the UK’s military to be Schwab’s private army – Schwab would tell Truss the world is about to melt and she’d sign it over with trembling lips.
Liz Truss is so dumb that she make a comment a while ago where she claimed Ukraine was invaded by the Tatars and then the Mongols – Liz thought these were two completely separate invading armies. It was actually Mongols that attacked Ukraine twice, they were simply known in other parts of Eastern Europe as Tartars.
A Russian official sneered at Truss for getting this wrong. Quite right, it’s appalling and alarming that the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs would make such a school-girlish mistake.
And sadly, no matter which way you look in UK politics, the LizRishi effect looks right back at you.
It’s gone long past the stage where written complaints will make a difference, except to leave a record for future generations to use when they try to figure out what kind of collective madness took hold of mankind* at the turn of the 3rd millennium.
______________
*Any feminists that thinks this is misogynist, GET OVER IT.
Excellent piece FW.
Initial comment:
Much as I would like to help Toby and Laura I am unable to oblige for one simple reason – I do not follow / watch any MS broadcaster and do not subscribe to any MS newspaper or magazine; those days are long gone.
I wish them the best of luck in a necessary endeavour but given that the likes of Ofcom are as corrupted as all MSM this will doubtless be a thankless task.
Well done both for having a go.
I think part of it is that the people that work for such agencies are actually quite thick and lazy. I find it hard to believe that the response would have been full of such word salad bullshit twenty years ago. We really are ruled by extremely unimpressive individuals.
Weird. Are you saying they answered a question no one asked? Amazing. That’s never happened before. It’s not a standard Leftist tactic at all.
‘because the science of anthropogenic global warming is “broadly settled” and “scientifically established”.’
Science has shown throughout history what is considered “settled” is regularly wrong. And … how is “settled” determined? By Ofcom? By the government? This means, as we know, Ofcom is not independent and fair and is infiltrated and compromised like most other institutions.
An honest institution would not support nudge methods in any direction.
More and more people are becoming aware of the corruption. But … these are decent people and will not become violent until they are desperate, Therefore, many will end up desperate because they won’t stop it until too late and probably turn on each other like rats in a trap. My friends, unless there is a miracle it does not look good. If we’re lucky we will be Chinese, if we’re unlucky we will be China’s slaves or dead.
Yesterday someone observed that “settled science” is oxymoronic. So it is, and in reality that term is coercive, in effect.
The more one hears of Ofcom, the more one mourns the demise of the old Press Council which, despite its flaws, was at least no lickspittle lapdog for the Government and its obsession with curbing free speech and dissidence.
‘In our Guidance, we identify the scientific principles behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming as an example of an issue which we considered to be broadly settled.’
Ofcom is as much the captive of the green blob as the MMS is. I wonder what it would take in Ofcom’s eyes to ‘unsettle’ the science.
Nothing in the published science supports the IPCC computer-model range of 2.5C to 8.5C for the global-temperature rise per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. A better founded estimate is 0.6C to 1.0C.
Coe et al (2021) put it at 0.2C, and estimated 0.25C as the total warming due to human-emitted CO2 since the Industrial Revolution.
Surely the issue is not that the science is settled but that the subliminal messaging is coercive and people do not have any choice to avoid being subjected to it other than to avoid watching TV / movies.
Maybe there should be a disclaimer – “this production contains messages that will not be immediately apparent and may alter your thinking”
Is this not the same as fake news? Information provided to people to change their view without their knowledge that it is being done?
Who shouted loudest about fake news – oh yes – the media and the luvvies…..
The biggie is what’s shown in schools. Parents can turn off the TV or computer in the daytime or evening if there’s something they think is wrong. Parents never really see schools programming.
I find the response from Ofcom in regard to the complaint, unbelievable. It is monsrous for them to respond by saying “….that because the science of anthropogenic global warming is “broadly settled” and “scientifically established”.
May I suggest that you all read this link below? It is very telling.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-2-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxix
This is utterly disgraceful!
Turn OFF msm until it reports with honesty and integrity. Until then TURN OFF. Sorry for shouting.