BBC Newsnight Editor: "Not The Corporation's Job To Save The Planet" Re. Canceled Climate Show

[hatrack]

LONDON (AFP) - The BBC has dropped plans to hold a day of programming highlighting the threat from climate change, it said Thursday, in a move which has drawn sharp criticism from environmental groups. The "Planet Relief" telethon had been pencilled in for early next year and was due to feature stars including Emmy Award-winning comedian Ricky Gervais.

But it was ditched after some senior BBC executives said that taking action on global warming was not in the publicly-funded broadcaster's remit.

Peter Barron, editor of the corporation's flagship news television programme "Newsnight", said last week it was "not the corporation's job to save the planet" and called for "Planet Relief" to be scrapped.

The corporation's head of TV news, Peter Horrocks, added that it was not the BBC's job to lead opinion on a subject. The BBC, which viewers help fund through an annual 135 pound (200 euro, 273 dollar) licence fee, faces frequent attacks from British newspapers over its alleged liberal bias, a claim which is angrily refuted by many of its leading lights.

EDIT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070906/wl_uk_afp/britainmediaenvironment_070906113605;_ylt=Ar5cltAB.hzuoKBeFy5A6i9rAlMA

You said more than you thought, didn't you Peter?

[phantom power]

1. Wow.

[stillcool]

2. funny...the 'corporations' job....

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/PoliticsNewsMedia.html
The Politics of News Media
from the book
False Hope
by Norman Solomon, 1994

Corporate control is not interference in the newsroom-if you own an institution you aren't interfering in it, you're running it. Orwell anyone? The conditioned reflex of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought." The doublethink process "has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. "
The debilitating obstacles that face journalists-and the rest of us-are primarily institutional. If we push hard to challenge the institutions around us, the struggle can change us for the better in the process. Rather than succumbing to the media manipulation that continues to foreclose better options, we can tune up our personal and collective "radar screens" to track unidentified flying propaganda. Determination to battle for more autonomy over our own possibilities-as individuals, as people communicating with each other, and as a society- opens up new and vital horizons.
In contrast, evading the truth of corporate power over news media is a disorienting mental traffic pattern that keeps tromping a path of political confusion. False mappings of society immobilize us to the great extent that we trust public mythologies more than firsthand realities. Imagine if Rand McNally and its competitors issued maps that had little resemblance to actual streets and highways and terrain. To the extent that we believed those maps, we'd be unable to go much of anywhere; we wouldn't be able to plan our journeys, or meet up with other people; for that matter we wouldn't even really know where we were.
-----------------------------------------
"Public" TV and radio are supposed to be different-an alternative. Over the years, the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" have gained credibility and trust among millions of college-educated people, an audience heavily concentrated in professional circles (including many liberals and more than a few leftists), where restive responses could be especially troublesome to upper-echelon managers and policy elites.
When push comes to shove, for instance when the American Flag goes up and the troops go out, the news operations of PBS and NPR are among the country's most regimented; during the Gulf War in early 1991, they shamelessly served the war-makers (a role briefly reprised in summer 1993 when U.S. missiles struck an Iraqi office complex and a number of nearby civilians in Baghdad). The manipulation- usually a bit more subtle than at times of U.S. military attack-is a year-round reality, as the media watch group FAIR has documented with studies of the guest lists and sources of "MacNeil/Lehrer" and NPR's daily news programs. A narrow range-of voices, sound-bites, commentators and analysis-comes to seem normal, even exemplary. After all, the news is in-depth, with many sentences in a row; our intelligence does not seem to be insulted.
Bogus alternatives of the NPR/PBS variety are part of a mass media bandwagon pulling news consumers along on a short conceptual leash. The absence of critical imagination has been normalized. Big-name journalists, affecting sharp-eyed realism and attention to realpolitik, preen their credentials of discernment and independence. In news media, as in politics, only your essential passivity is sought. (All that advertisers and "underwriters" want are your purchases; all that politicians want are your votes.) It's called programming.
The puffed-up men and occasional women on network political shows are there to convey normalcy, providing the erudite ambience of in-control continuity from those who know best. They are On The Case. Anointed, seemingly confident, practiced and glib, functioning as if professional choruses in some upside down Greek play. They serve as inverted Cassandras: The real tragedy is that they are so widely believed.
Political battles are largely struggles over perception; how we see the world has everything to do with how we will live in dominant assumptions- like familiar gases-are seldom noted, but they keep entering bloodstreams, flooding brains and hearts.

[redqueen]

3. Not surprising at all.

I hope this will go a ways toward disabusing some people of their trust in the beeb.