Has the BBC been invaded by a cabal of Extinction Rebellion protesters who have tied up the Director General in his swivel chair? I ask because of a remarkable interview on Newsnight which marks a new low in the objectivity of the BBC’s climate coverage.
The flagship BBC Two news programme last night covered the threatened disruption of the London Marathon by Just Stop Oil protesters. Given that activists from another organisation did indeed carry out leaked plans to disrupt the Grand National – which delayed the start of the race – it is a threat to be taken very seriously. It was entirely proper that the subject be covered, and that the programme highlight an apparent split between climate protest groups; Extinction Rebellion has pledged not to disrupt the event, while Just Stop Oil has so far refused to make any such assurances.
However, what followed was an extraordinary one-sided item. Newsnight’s presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded to hold a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion.
Newsnight has often been caught out for biased coverage
There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot?
There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too – given that it has offered to ‘police’ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business?
None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that ‘violence’ was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint.
Rumbelow was then introduced. She asserted that ‘we need to move into civil resistance against our criminal government which is pushing for new oil and gas’. Derbyshire failed to challenge this remark and ask the obvious: what criminal law is the government supposed to have broken?
Rumbelow also went on to assert that juries were refusing to convict climate protesters. This may have happened in a few cases, but there are plenty of climate activists who have been found guilty.
Derbyshire did read out a government statement explaining why it was issuing new oil and gas licences. She also challenged the views of Rumbelow and Read in places. But there was no-one there to represent the opinions of many, many people in Britain, who think Just Stop Oil and its like are a bunch of entitled, spoilt kids who are making totally impractical demands – and who are making exaggerated claims about the climate in the process.
Instead, the interview cut to Read, who claimed that it is ‘absolutely clear now that…we must stop having new oil, new coal etc if we are going to have any chance of…any kind of liveable future’. Could he justify that claim with a few facts? He wasn’t even asked.
Newsnight, as so many BBC programmes are apt to do, simply presented the hysterical claims of climate protesters as if they were scientific truth and the views of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil as if they represented the full breadth of public opinion in Britain.
Newsnight has often been caught out for biased coverage, such as the monologue by Emily Maitlis (who no longer works for the programme) in 2020 declaring Dominic Cummings guilty of breaking lockdown rules. But Thursday’s item on climate protesters was so brazenly one-sided that you wonder whether the programme is any longer even trying to fulfil its duty to provide balance.
Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Help the Planet) by Ross Clark is published by Forum Press
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