Authored by Paul Homewood via notalotofpeopleknowthat blog,
This is frightening. Indeed it is truly Orwellian...
From the Guardian:
A U-turn by the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom means it will investigate complaints of climate change denial on television and radio for the first time since 2017. The move marks a victory for campaigners who have accused the regulator of allowing some broadcasters “to spout dangerous climate lies” and “flout” rules on accuracy and impartiality.
Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and TalkRadio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints.
One complaint was about comments from a Talk guest who said in November that climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false”. In the second case, also in November, another guest said the Labour government’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”.
A reassessment led Ofcom to conclude its approach to “due impartiality” in the broadcasts “required reconsideration”, with the results of the investigations to be published in due course. Ofcom stuck by its decision to not investigate three other climate complaints.
“Rightwing channels have been allowed to spout dangerous climate lies, unchecked, for too long,” said a GLP spokesperson. “We’re glad Ofcom is finally listening and await the conclusion of the investigations. Should it fail to take action against Talk’s misinformation, we will not hesitate to hold them to account.”
An Ofcom spokesperson said: “In re-examining the programmes, we concluded that they raise potentially substantive issues under the broadcasting code which warrant investigation. We have, therefore, opened investigations [on] whether they breached our rules on due impartiality and material misleadingness.” Ofcom said it had also opened another climate-related investigation after a viewer complaint about another TalkTV programme.
A spokesperson for Talk said: “We, as we always would, will cooperate with Ofcom in these matters.”
Full story here.
The first point to make is that there are already rules in place to address factually inaccurate news reporting. But this is not what is at issue here.
OFCOM, it appears, now want to police free speech. Both of these new complaints concern the views of guests, not the journalists or presenters.
Guests on these sort of shows make all sorts of outlandish, and sometimes patently false, comments about all sorts of topics. That is their right. We still have something called freedom of speech in this country.
OFCOM does not get involved in these other cases, so why should they intervene when the topic is climate change?
This decision to intervene in free speech by OFCOM opens a whole new barrel of worms.
What will happen in future if somebody challenges the establishment line on, say, hurricanes?
There is a wide variety of scientific opinion on most climate topics. Will OFCOM be the new arbiter of which version is “correct”?
Will they ban anybody who dares offer a different opinion, or, heaven forbid, dare to quote some facts?
Maybe OFCOM will also ban all use of fraudulent weather attribution models, but I somehow doubt it!
This is a chilling suppression of free speech. “Truth” is fine, but who decides what is true and what is not? OFCOM? The Government? BBC? UN?
And it won’t stop with climate change. How long before we are not allowed to call Starmer the worst PM ever? Or dare to criticise his Government?
We will end up with George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where the Government decides what is right and what is wrong.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”