Make no mistake: the RCP are no longer just a contrarian pain in the arse doing their best to divide the Left as they did in the 80s. They are now a major force to be reckoned with in the media, and it’s about time C4 did a major Dispatches-style expose on them. It would be nice to see Furedi, Heartfield, Allirajah, and others in the inner circle squinting into the camera lights…

‘If you hire an undertaker, you get a funeral’ is the best way to sum up what C4 did. If it wanted a polemic - fine. If it wanted opinionated journalism, OK. What it actually wanted was to be a bit radical and contrarian, perhaps as a strange attempt at ‘balance’ .

So it hired Martin Durkin to make a film. Now since Durkin had been censured by the ITC in 1997 after he made another programme for C4, and there have been other stories of his tactics since, they must have known what they were getting into, even if they had no idea about his LM links.

What pissed us all off was just how dishonest the programme was. ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ is something the programme makers were not familiar with. Graphs were labelled as coming from NASA, when they had actually come from a dodgy one-man-band called the Oregon Institute, and had then been further manipulated to bolster the programmes case. There were large amounts of basic errors , which were almost certainly deliberate, rather than accidental. And the people they had on were some of the most well-known ’scientists-for-hire’ used by climate deniers and the fossil fuel lobby. C4 seemingly had little interest in making even the most basic checks on what the programme contained.

I think theories should be tested, but although your entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own data. Making up stuff, and then passing it off to a public very largely unaware that what you say is anything other than fact is simply dishonest.

C4 could have simply said, mea culpa, and admitted that putting it out had been a mistake. Although they changed some things for the repeat, there was more than enough left in to create a totally false impression. And C4 continue to stonewall.

Unfortunately, Ofcom took a very charitable view of C4’s actions, and seemingly dodged hard answers whenever possible. The bar was set impossibly high as far as showing ‘harm’, but David Rado is his team http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/ will be appealing, if only on the grounds that Ofcom deliberately choose the wrong part of the Act to consider the complaint under. Ofcom also couldn’t be bothered to do the most basic research regarding our complaints. For instance, Ofcom ruled that the background, expertise and links of many of the ’scientists’ featured was very ‘complex’, and therefore decided simply not to bother. 10 minutes on http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch would have given them the info. they simply didn’t want to know.

Having said all that, its still a victory, but its still less than perfect.

That statement is either ignorant or mendacious.

There is not a single word in that sentence that isn’t factually accurate.

The court case was not an attempt to prevent the distribution of Gore’s film, it was an attempt to prevent the government from expending taxpayers’ money on pushing propaganda on our children.

That sentence is tautological. Of course it was aimed at preventing the distribution of Gore’s film (in schools)!

However, there is a world of difference between an independent and advertisement funded television production and a government programme, funded by taxpayers, pushing an inaccurate polemic onto every school in the country.

a) C4 is part subsidised by the taxpayer; b) it has oligopolistic power as one of the few broadcasters permitted to use the digital and analogue parts of the bandwidth spectrum. We can argue until the cows come home about how it should be regulated (broadly I think OfCom has got it right), but the fact that it should be is a no-brainer.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

I don’t see how they imagine they are radical and challenging, when in fact they’re standing right beside the establishment, and are grimly predictable and turgid at all times. And their support for China, I think, shows their true colours: their behaviours have changed but their far-left, dictatorial values haven’t…

I think they will never get anywhere, because in time people will realise how shallow, glib and cheap they are and reject them. But we’ll probably have to put up with them for a while to come.

That statement is either ignorant or mendacious. The court case was not an attempt to prevent the distribution of Gore’s film, it was an attempt to prevent the government from expending taxpayers’ money on pushing propaganda on our children.

There were several substantial errors of fact in the Gore film - as it appears there may have been in the C4 documentary. However, there is a world of difference between an independent and advertisement funded television production and a government programme, funded by taxpayers, pushing an inaccurate polemic onto every school in the country.