A couple of notable recent blog entries from Spinwatch, by Andy Rowell:

Revealed: The Hidden Agenda Behind Al Gore Attack

It’s the story many hacks and sceptics have been waiting for: To shoot down Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. Last night, the BBC’s flagship news programme, the Ten O’Clock news, led with the story that a British High Court Judge had ruled that Gore’s film had made “alarmist” and “exaggerated” claims.

As the trailers finished the BBC’s Anchorman Huw Edwards said: “A controversial film on climate change being shown in British schools is heavily criticized by a high court judge for making alarmist and exaggerated claims”.

The overriding theme of the piece, by the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin, was that Gore’s film was flawed with nine significant errors. The judge had pointed out it was “a political film.”

However what the BBC spectacularly failed to do in its programme last night was give any background to the “political” nature of the attack against the film. The BBC reported that the fact the High Court case against the film was brought by Stewart Dimmock, a “school governor in Kent” who called the film a “political shockumentary”.

What the BBC did not mention was Dimmock’s own political connections. Dimmock is a member of the political group, the New Party. The founder and chair of the New Party is Robert Durward, whose political party is so right-wing it has been labeled “fascist” by the Scottish Tories.

More importantly, there is a cross-fertilisation between the New Party and Durward’s other pet project – he is the founder of the anti-environmental Scientific Alliance. Both the New Party and Scientific Alliance work closely with the PR company Foresight Communications.

The Alliance is one of the leading sceptic organizations in the UK, that campaigns against climate change, against Al Gore’s film and promotes the heavily criticized alternative film “Great Global Warming Swindle”.

It has also forged links with skeptics in the US. For example in 2005, the Alliance held a conference on Climate Change called “Apocalypse No: Assessing Catastrophic Climate Change.”

Leading climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer Nils-Axel Morner and Benny Peiser spoke. The keynote speaker was David Bellamy, the British naturalist, who believes climate change is “poppycock”. At the time the Alliance’s Scientific Advisory Forum also included Sallie Baliunas, one of the world’s leading climate sceptics.

Pity the BBC failed to inform viewers of the political nature of this attack …

BBC Messes Up Again on Gore Story

The BBC is making a real hash of the Al Gore story. Today on Radio Four’s flagship lunch-time news programme, it invited Martin Livermore from the Scientific Alliance, to give an interview on Gore winning the Nobel Prize.

As we have blogged on the site, the Scientific Alliance was set up by Scottish quarryman Robert Durward in 2001 to fight environmental regulations and take the sceptical line on climate change.

It was one of the first “corporate front groups” to be set up in the UK. It has consistently tried to undermine climate science and networked with Exxon-funded groups in the US and UK.

However rather than saying the Alliance undermines the debate on climate science, the BBC’s presenter Shaun Ley described the Alliance as “campaigning to improve the quality of debate about science”.

Asked about the Nobel award to Gore, Martin Livermore the Alliance’s ex-Dupont front man said that it was “not healthy” to give awards to “fashionable causes”. He also warned Gore’s award would “close down the scientific debate”.

When asked about the recent legal case against Gore’s film in the UK, which had been objected to by “a parent”, Livermore said the Judge who had criticised Gore had made a “sensible decision” on a “political film” that represented “just one point of view”. What the BBC failed to do again is actually tell the listener what was going on here.

To an uninformed listener it seems that the Scientific Alliance and legal action “by the parent” are completely separate. The problem is they are not. They are funded by the same person: Robert Durward, a Scottish Quarryman and chair of the New Party – which his political opponents have described as fascist.

The so-called parent is Stewart Dimmock, who is a member of the New Party, a failed New Party councillor, and who has admitted being backed by the New Party in taking the legal action.

So, unbeknown to the public, on the radio at lunch-time the BBC interviewed an ex-chemical industry spokesman who works for a front group set up by a quarryman who was talking about a legal case that the quarryman has funded. But that’s obviously too complicated for the BBC or too insignificant a fact to tell their listeners.