Saturday, November 24th 2012, 4:24 PM EST
I don’t know which was worse to wake up to on Friday morning: news of those grotesquely inflated pay-offs being given to former BBC apparatchiks or the demonstration that followed of how lamentably we are served in return for all that wasted money. On the one hand, it was George Entwistle being handed half a million pounds, or £10,000 a day for his brief, inglorious 54 days as director-general. On the other, it was a succession of items on the Today programme previewing next week’s publication of the Government’s dog’s breakfast of an Energy Bill.
This began, appropriately, with an item by Roger Harrabin, the organiser of that notorious secret seminar in 2006 which led the BBC to decide that it was quite all right to abandon any pretence at balance in its coverage of climate change and energy issues. It concluded by giving the programme’s peak slot to a propagandist from Greenpeace and a patsy interview with Ed Davey, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. He was allowed to get away with a load of waffle to the effect that his plans for “energy savings”, and for us all to pay an extra £7.6 billion a year for “green electricity”, will not push our energy bills even higher than they are already (as everyone else predicts), but instead will somehow reduce them.
The problem with BBC coverage of these issues is that its reporters and presenters don’t even begin to do the homework needed to give them a grasp of the basics of the subject. Their brains addled by talking to their friends in Greenpeace, they unwittingly mislead their audience with almost every sentence they utter. I shall return to this next week when we have seen what Mr Davey’s dog’s breakfast actually contains.
Click source for more from Christopher Booker [The only way we can 'renegotiate' is by asking to leave the EU]
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