C4's Global Warming Swindle
Digery Cohen | 09.03.2007 18:28
Digery Cohen
e-mail:
digerycohen@yahoo.co.uk
Additions
Durkin again!
10.03.2007 11:09
"The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997, the director, Martin Durkin, produced a very similar series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamt up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and to edit their answers to change their meaning. Following complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(14) Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has ever made. Are institutional memories really so short?"
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30/another-species-of-denial/
"In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.
...On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately enough, “Modified Truth”. Already it appears that the programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin’s characteristic approach. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/
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http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30/another-species-of-denial/
"In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.
...On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately enough, “Modified Truth”. Already it appears that the programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin’s characteristic approach. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/
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viewer
Comments
Hide the following 7 comments
c4
09.03.2007 19:56
concerned of gipton
that cunt martin durkin made it
09.03.2007 20:53
http://www.climatedenial.org/
sid
Homepage: http://www.climatedenial.org/
thoughtful
12.03.2007 13:47
comments like this do the environmental movement a disservice.
munkle
e-mail: munkle55@gmail.com
What about the others?
13.03.2007 12:02
Dave
Communism?
13.03.2007 16:04
A large portion of the programme was given over to blaming the furore amongst the public on “homeless” communists who flocked to the environmentalist banner in the 1980’s as a means of remaining politically active in opposition of capitalism and globalisation.
If anything, the programme maker should be branded as a capitalist/globalist.
Politicizing this in any way (particularly when you're confused about what communism is) isn't very helpful. This should be a scientific problem with scientific solutions.
T-Style
The RCP...
13.03.2007 22:15
If you had been you would know who the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party_%28Furedi%29 ) were (and of course I don't mean the original RCP, Jock Haston etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party_%281944-1949%29 ), and their stance on rather crucial issues like the miners strike -- "they should have held a ballot". Or the manner in which they tried to recruit -- going up to people on main shopping streets and saying things like "are you a racist?". Or their ghastly magazine, Living Marxism... Oh what memories...
When the RCP fell apart some of their supporters went on to become pro-capitalists -- this is a path not unique to the RCP, ex-members of the SWP like Christopher Hitchens ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens ) and further back Max Shachtman ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Shachtman ) have gone down this path before...
This is clearly the path that the writer and director of this TV show has gone down...
Veteran
Does CO2 lag or lead global warming?
14.03.2007 01:30
(or are inconvenient truths denied on this forum?)
cleandrinkingwater