The BBC's secular inquisition

Melanie Phillips
"I am open-mouthed. The BBC Trust is recommending that its journalists ditch balance for propaganda.

A report being published today has apparently decided that the BBC no longer needs to interview man-made global warming sceptics because there is a consensus on this issue that the theory is true.

Its conclusions are said to be based in part on recommendations by the geneticist Professor Steve Jones. Astonishingly, he is said not only to have found no evidence of bias in the BBC’s output on climate change, but suggests that on issues like this where he says there is a ‘scientific consensus’ – also including the MMR vaccination and genetically modified crops – there should be no need for the BBC to find opponents of the mainstream view.

This is as terrifying as it is outrageous. First of all, the claim that there is a consensus on man-made global warming is itself false. The wickedly cynical propaganda strategy to promote this false belief in a consensus was described in an eye-opening blog post by James Delingpole in the Telegraph last year: "