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  1. Oct 1

    Peter Oborne On 25 Years Of Media Lens And An Appeal For Support

    In response to news that we are this year celebrating 25 years of Media Lens we have received many kind comments from readers, some of them sympathising that it must be ‘awful’ to live with the knowledge that we are ‘so despised by mainstream journalists’. But, in fact, it has been surprising just how much support we have received - often expressed privately, for fear of consequences - from journalists deeply frustrated by the limits placed on their free speech. As Noam Chomsky witheringly told a visibly wincing Andrew Marr of the BBC: ‘Well, I know some of the best, and best-known investigative reporters in the United States, I won’t mention names, whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority - I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and in fact the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.’ (See at 2 mins 03 here; transcript here) Last week, the following comment was tweeted on X by Martin Asser who worked at the BBC for 22 years (1995-2015 and 2022-2024) with a stint as head of communications at the American University of Beirut (2015-2021): ‘I remember in mid-2000s being handed Media Lens emails by my editor at BBC Middle East Online desk to draft the responses. They were hardest (usually impossible) to argue against compared with the pro-war pro-Israel stuff flooding our inbox.’ In June, we had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Oborne on Zoom about an article he was planning to write to mark our 25th anniversary. Oborne has worked as political editor of the Spectator, as chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, as a journalist at the Evening Standard, as a commentator at the Express, and has made nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4. One might not ordinarily expect this track record to translate as sympathy for our cause, but Oborne is a rare fish indeed. Consider, for example, that one of our first mentions of his journalism came in 2009 when he responded like this in the Daily Mail to an MPs’ expenses scandal: ‘Nobody can say any longer that our politicians are motivated by honesty, duty or patriotism. Almost to a man and woman they have been exposed as cheats and crooks whose primary motivation is lining their own pockets rather than serving Britain. ‘As a result, Parliament itself no longer looks like our greatest national institution. Instead, it has been exposed as an organised criminal conspiracy whose primary purpose is to defraud the taxpayer and serve the vested interest of a venal political class.’ Having somehow got away with that blast of honesty, a decade later, Oborne published an excoriating piece titled, ‘British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine’, commenting: ‘Papers and media organisations yearn for privileged access and favourable treatment. And they are prepared to pay a price to get it. ‘This price involves becoming a subsidiary part of the government machine. It means turning their readers and viewers into dupes. ‘This client journalism allows Downing Street to frame the story as it wants. Some allow themselves to be used as tools to smear the government’s opponents. They say goodbye to the truth.’ This was classic Oborne: blistering honesty completely unhindered by concern for personal consequences born of a fierce integrity and deeply felt compassion for the victims of greed and cruelty. The response from his rather less honourable ‘mainstream’ peers: instant, total cancellation: ‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement.’ (Peter Oborne, ‘The Assault on Truth – Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism,’ Simon & Schuster, 2021, p.132) Warm thanks to Peter Oborne and to Declassified UK for allowing us to republish the piece below, originally published here, for our annual appeal for support: How Media Lens forged a path for independent journalism As Media Lens celebrates 25 years, Peter Oborne pays tribute to the dissident outlet that influenced his work We are seeing today a surge in heretical media outlets including Novara, Doubledown News, Drop Site, Byline Times, Middle East Eye – and of course Declassified UK. We have emerged thanks in part to a growing appreciation that the mainstream media is broken, cannot be trusted, and is far more likely to disseminate falsehood than tell the truth. So it is only fair to wish a happy 25th birthday to the earliest of these dissident outlets – Media Lens. Media Lens first published in July 2001. The timing was perfect, with George W Bush starting to mobilise ahead of the Iraq invasion. Media Lens recorded how Bush’s United States softened up reporters and editors as Tony Blair made the ‘moral case’ for war. It showed how journalists had played down the mass deaths of Iraqi children from sanctions and ignored the devastating effects of bombing infrastructure (such as the wrecking of schools and power plants). The Daily Telegraph dismissed the impact of sanctions as an ‘allegation’ dreamt up by “Left-wing activists, Arab nationalists and Muslim extremists”. Vindication? When foreign secretary Jack Straw and US President Bill Clinton claimed that Saddam Hussein had booted the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, with few exceptions British reporters went along with the lie. Authoritative sources, such as the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, strongly challenged the official narrative. They were ignored. And when the tanks finally rolled into Baghdad, British journalists worked overtime to hail the ‘vindication’ (the term used by Mark Mardell and Nicholas Witchell of the BBC as well as John Irvine of ITN) of Tony Blair. Andrew Marr stood outside Downing Street to proclaim that Tony Blair “stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” Media Lens recorded all of this (and much more) in regular bulletins. It also wrote emails to reporters asking for an explanation of why their reports had omitted relevant facts, promoted obvious falsehoods or told only one side of the story. These letters were polite and thoughtful, and all the more deadly for that. Some recipients failed to answer, some engaged (they tended to lose the argument) and others resorted to abuse. In 2007, Media Lens won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award. John Pilger explained that “Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion and to bad history.” Libya After the invasion of Iraq, Media Lens documented the lies peddled about Libya, including the unevidenced claim from US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice that Colonel Gaddafi was supplying viagra to his troops to facilitate a campaign of mass rape, and the discredited warning that the Libyan dictator was planning a genocide in Benghazi. When the Gaddafi regime fell, mainstream journalists duly noted that David Cameron, architect of the fiasco alongside Nicholas Sarkozy, had been ‘vindicated’ (the inevitable term deployed Ian Pannell and Norman Smith of the BBC). The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson voiced the same sentiment as Andrew Marr, though with different language: “Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Col Gaddafi his first foe. Today his first real taste of military victory.” Media Lens went on to expose the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy employed by British journalists against Jeremy Corbyn. It documented the smear campaign against Julian Assange. Media Lens has been accused of being ‘useful idiots’ for taking the side of dictators. They responded that although “we hold no candle whatever for Gaddafi, and had never expressed a scintilla of support for him, [it] mattered not at all.” Exposing liberal bias Media Lens mainly ignored the blatantly biased reporting of the right-wing press repeating official propaganda. Instead of these easy targets like the Daily Mail, they focussed on progressive or centre left media which boasted of its objectivity and impartiality, especially the Guardian and the BBC. Here, Media Lens was performing an important function. Mainstream media plays an important role in shaping public understanding of events, yet there has long been an unwritten rule (“dog does not bite dog”) that journalists do not challenge colleagues. For a quarter of a century, Media Lens has held sloppy or biased reporting to account. This made it very unpopular. Its work has never been more relevant than today in the wake of the momentous reporting failures of the Gaza war and the US/Israeli attack on Iran that have left many British broadcasters and newspapers complicit in war crimes. Changed climate It is a remarkable achievement for a two-man team, neither of whom has a background in journalism. David Edwards is a former teacher while his colleague David Cromwell holds a doctorate in solar physics, is an expert in oceanography and at one stage worked for oil giant Shell. His scientific knowledge gives special credibility to a long standing focus of

  2. Sep 22

    ‘You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train’ – The Ed Sheeran Furore

    Audio narration by Matt Alford English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is a megastar. With over 128 million followers on Spotify, he ranks as the platform’s second most-followed artist, surpassed only by Taylor Swift. Sheeran’s official YouTube channel has more than 50 million subscribers. His shows are among the highest-attended live music events in history, often setting attendance records across North America, Europe and Australasia. The US rapper Macklemore was a support act on Sheeran’s current LOOP Tour, before he spoke these words to an audience of nearly 90,000 people at the MetLife Stadium in the US on 4 September: ‘I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this all day. One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine! ‘I said, Free Palestine! ‘I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank, know that we have not forgotten them. ‘And this next song was inspired by the bravery of Columbia University students who led an encampment movement that mobilised the entire world; open up hearts, myself included, so thank you to those students that risked their diplomas, that risked their tuition, that risked their scholarships, that stood up and said, no. CUAD students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voices for Peace. Thank you, guys. ‘To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. ‘So I say Free Palestine! I say Free Lebanon! I say Free Cuba! I say Free Congo! Free Sudan! I say Free all people in America living in fear of this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free until we are all free.’ A controversy was quickly manufactured by pro-Israel individuals and organisations to get Macklemore kicked off the tour. Ed Sheeran commented: ‘Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.’ Macklemore filled in the gaps: ‘Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.’ Robert Kraft said the decision to bar Macklemore from Gillette Stadium, which was intended to be ‘a welcoming environment for all guests’, was made after the comments at the MetLife shows and ‘a broader history of rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community’. But there was nothing antisemitic or hateful about what Macklemore said - he explicitly rejected antisemitism. And Kraft’s reference to ‘a broader history’ of ‘offensive’ comments in fact points to a single incident in 2014 when Macklemore wore fancy dress to mingle with an audience. He described the outfit: ‘On Friday night we had a surprise show at the EMP Museum in Seattle. Earlier in the day I thought it would be fun to dress up in a disguise and go incognito to the event, so that I could walk around unnoticed and surprise the crowd with a short performance. I picked up a bunch of fake mustaches and beards and grabbed a left over wig from our recent trip to Japan. ‘As it turns out the fake noses they sell at the costume store are usually big (my nose didn’t fit most of them). So I ended up with a big witch nose. I went with a black beard, because that’s the furthest color from my natural hair. Disguise was the intention. I personally thought I looked very ambiguous in terms of any “type” of person. Some people there thought I looked like Ringo, some Abe Lincoln. If anything I thought I looked like Humpty Hump with a bowl cut.’ Last week in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland saw it differently: ‘Those outside the country appalled by what they see in Gaza or the West Bank sometimes struggle to know what they can do to help. The temptation is to rally around, say, the rapper Macklemore, calling out “Free Palestine” from Ed Sheeran’s stage – but that temptation fades a little when you see that the same Macklemore once performed dressed up as what looked unmistakably like an antisemitic caricature of a Jew, complete with a false, giant nose. He later apologised, saying a “Jewish stereotype” had never crossed his mind.’ This was classic Freedland: working hard to appear even-handed while crudely undermining the credibility of Israel’s critics. Why ‘crudely’? Because the use of ‘unmistakably’ suggested there is no doubt when in fact there is plenty of doubt. Someone deliberately dressing up as an antisemitic caricature in public would have to be in thrall to an extreme form of racism that would surely manifest itself at other times – it would not be a one-off. The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone commented: ‘If there had been other incidents of the artist expressing hateful opinions about Jews, one could make the case that he may have been lying about his intentions with the fake nose incident. But there are no such incidents… There is not one shred of evidence, anywhere, that these words [of explanation] were insincere.’ Freedland offered a similarly damning assessment in 2018 when he wrote in the Guardian: ‘Similar was the mural of hooked-nose bankers, counting their money on the backs of the poor. The artist himself said he had depicted Jews, but when Corbyn heard it was to be removed his response was “Why?” He literally could not see anything wrong with it. Again, that’s nothing to do with opposing Israel. That’s just old school antisemitism.’ Again, Corbyn ‘literally could not see anything wrong’ just as Macklemore’s outfit was ‘unmistakably’ antisemitic. In both cases, Freedland was suggesting absolute certainty where none existed. In fact, the biggest nose on display in the mural belonged to a very recognisable J.P. Morgan, an Episcopalian Christian. In her book, ‘Killing Corbynism – Zionism’s War on Socialism’, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt wrote of the mural: ‘The artwork in question – Freedom for Humanity – False Profits – depicted caricatures of six white men playing a board game on the bent backs of faceless black and brown people. The central characters were identified by the artist as Andrew Carnegie, Aleister Crowley, JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg, only two of whom (Rothschild and Warburg) were Jewish.’ (Incarnadine Imprint, 2026, pp.120-121, our emphasis) Smears aside, Macklemore appears to have a sensitive and astute understanding of these issues, as indicated by this comment on free speech: ‘And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying “Free Palestine” gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.’ If Kraft, who is worth around $15 billion, cancelled Macklemore for defending Palestinian human rights, expressing solidarity with ‘all my Jewish brothers and sisters’, who is Robert Kraft? This is as much as the BBC was willing to say: ‘Kraft, who is Jewish, confirmed on Monday that he had made the decision to bar Macklemore from the Gillette Stadium because his venue would not “provide a platform for hate speech”. ‘The tycoon accused the Grammy-winning rapper of having “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric”, which Macklemore denies.’ What the BBC was not willing to say was that Kraft had previously said: ‘After my family, there is nothing I’m more passionate about than the state of Israel and my Jewish identity.’ In 2019, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally awarded Kraft the Genesis Prize, often described as the ‘Jewish Nobel’. The prize recognises extraordinary contributions to humanity, and commitment to Jewish values and the State of Israel. Kraft donated the $1 million prize money to organisations dedicated to combating ‘antisemitism’ and the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement targeting Israel. Netanyahu described Kraft as: ‘A terrific champion of Israel and someone that I am deeply proud to call my friend.’ Kraft replied: ‘Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, not only for your kind words, but for your decades of leadership, but especially what you do for this state of Israel.’ In 2019, Kraft created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. He is a longtime supporter of Donald Trump. Sheeran sang at Kraft’s wedding in 2022 and described him as ‘super sweet’. Kraft’s passionate support for Israel was similarly soft-pedalled in the Guardian, which mentioned: ‘…Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a prominent supporter of and donor to Israel …’. A Guardian opinion piece by Laura Snapes went further, mentioning some of the reality but not Netanyahu’s personal friendship with Kraft: ‘Kraft is friends with Trump and is a major donor to Israel: Netanyahu said at a 2019 awards ceremony honouring Kraft that “Israel does not have a more loyal friend”.’ To her credit, Snapes commented that ‘losing financial and professional opportunities and creati

  3. Aug 24

    4 Billion Dead: ‘There Are No Words’

    Audio narration by Matt Alford If you need an indication of how divorced the ‘mainstream’ media is from reality, consider this: the possibility of at least 4 billion deaths resulting from 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050 made barely a dent in news headlines. Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report, ‘Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature’. The report examined the risks and likely catastrophic impacts if humanity does not take immediate decisive action to stop greenhouse gas emissions which have already led to increasingly devastating wildfires, flooding, droughts, loss of harvests and threats to food supply. The current global temperature rise, compared to pre-industrial times, is on the verge of breaching the 1.5C ‘cap’ agreed in 2015 at the Paris climate summit. Protesters said then: ‘1.5 to stay alive’. However, on the present trajectory of emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates a rise of around 2C by 2050; possibly as early as 2039. A 2C rise by 2050 was the ‘highly likely’ case included in a range of scenarios considered by the expert actuaries and Exeter researchers. They labelled 2C warming as ‘catastrophic’ and listed a number of associated impacts on climate, nature, society and human mortality: · Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems. · Major extinction events in multiple regions. · Ocean circulation severely impacted. · High number of climate tipping points triggered, with a partial ‘tipping cascade’, increasing climate instability even further. · Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions; low-lying regions lost. · Heat and water stress driving involuntary mass migration of billions of people. · Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict. And the starkest conclusion of all: · The deaths of at least 2 billion people. As utterly grim as this was, the expert team also included an even more ‘extreme’ scenario of 3C warming by 2050 which cannot be ruled out; indeed, it is highly plausible. Recently, New Scientist reported a new climate study that concluded the world may warm by 25 per cent more than current projections predict, suggesting around 3.25C of warming by 2100. In fact, some reputable scientists believe that a 3C temperature rise by 2050 is the most likely outcome if the current dangerous fossil fuel trajectory continues. For example, the German Physical and Meteorological Societies issued a joint warning last year that the planet could warm by 3C over preindustrial levels by 2050. Leon Simons, a Dutch climate researcher and the Executive Director of the Club of Rome Netherlands, produced this useful thread on X about the warning. Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of policy institute Climate Analytics, warned: ‘This is just physics. We’re losing the ability to limit warming even by two degrees without strong action and people need to be aware of that and be aware that it’s a political failure. It’s not an act of God or anything. It is just because politicians in many places are not acting fast enough.’ Arguably, there are no politicians in positions of real power who are ‘acting fast enough’. In fact, they are avoiding, even blocking, substantive action on climate. They have essentially been captured by fossil fuel interests. So, what would be the effects of 3C global warming? The ‘Planetary Solvency’ report estimated that there would be at least 4 billion deaths. There would also be: · Multiple climate tipping points triggered, and a tipping cascade. · Breakdown of several critical ecosystem services and Earth systems. · High level of extinction of higher order life on Earth. · Significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or state failure with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital and systems identity. · Frequent large scale mortality events. To put things in awful perspective, 4 billion deaths is around half the current global population. Note that the 4 billion figure did not appear in the title of the report. Nor was it addressed in the main body of the text. Instead, it appeared in an appendix on page 32 of the 40-page report. How did the Guardian report it? With the headline, ‘Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries’. The figure of 4 billion dead was only mentioned in passing in the fifth paragraph. Later that month, an Observer piece on the climate crisis by Robin McKie, a former science and environment editor of the Observer, addressed the report: ‘It argues the global economy “could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090, unless immediate policy action on risks posed by the climate ­crisis is taken,” adding: “Populations are already impacted by food ­system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic ­contraction and conflict become more likely.”’ McKie then quoted Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, who called the report ‘a stark message’. McGuire continued: ‘In light of the projections in Planetary Solvency, it is pretty clear that hope is now a luxury we can no longer afford, and the truth is we are in deep, deep excrement that is getting deeper by the day. ‘It is a simple fact that there is now an extraordinary disconnect between government and business actions and the reality of the colossal impacts of climate breakdown of society and economy.’ There was, however, no mention in the Observer article of the likely billions of deaths. We could not find a single article about the actuaries’ report in any other national UK newspaper. Nor could we find anything on the BBC News website. This silence is extraordinary. It is a stunning example of propaganda by omission; arguably the greatest crime of state-corporate media. As it happens, the team of experts that produced the report included an actuary from the UK government Actuary’s Department. The government website therefore posted an anodyne summary, titled ‘Actuaries highlight the increasing risk of Planetary Insolvency’. But it made no mention of the prospect of billions of deaths. The Gargantuan Lie Adam McKay is the Academy Award-winning director of ‘The Big Short’, ‘Vice’, and ‘Don’t Look Up’. In this most recent film, two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humanity of an approaching comet that will destroy Earth, only to be met with apathy, political denial, and corporate greed. Clearly, the film was an allegory for the climate crisis. McKay recently wrote a powerful piece titled, ‘The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate’. He wrote: ‘It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day… This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”’ This lie is not ‘the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President.’ Instead, it is a lie that has prevented serious action being taken to cut emissions: ‘Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.” ‘Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.’ The grand lie of ‘we have more time’ includes: ‘lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.”’ McKay added: ‘In service of the Great Lie, the government of the United Kingdom even tried to bury a climate report from its own intelligence agency before it was leaked. To my knowledge there aren’t many spies being called tree huggers, unless they’re undercover of course. But the MI5 and MI6 are clear-eyed about the danger that’s coming. The report warned that “global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”’ The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit UK organisation, found that almost two-thirds of articles in UK national newspapers that referenced wildfires during this summer’s record-breaking temperatures failed to mention climate change. The ECIU also reported that 72% of coverage of the UK’s June heatwaves likewise failed to mention climate change. And an analysis by Climate News Tracker in May found that more than half of UK television and radio news coverage of that month’s heatwave also failed to link it to climate change. And yet, UK climate breakdown is ‘coming faster and harder’, according to the economist Professor Matthew Agarwala, the chair of sustainable finance at the University of Sussex Bennett Institute. We may now be entering a ‘perfect storm’ of climate impacts that could devastate the country’s infrastructure and food supply. Luke Tryl, UK director of More in Common, a non-profit research agency that aims to understand what Britons think and why, noted recently via X: ‘Weather may be getting cooler, but what has been the impact of recent heatwaves on public attitudes to and salience of climate and net zero? Two thirds of the public sa

  4. Aug 4

    ‘Let’s Just Embrace A Mediterranean Lifestyle’: Climate Lunacy And Burnham's 'Pragmatism'

    ‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’ This has to be a serious candidate for the most foolish comment ever made publicly by a British newspaper editor. Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, opined: ‘We’ve lost the war against global warming - so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather.’ One might wonder which trench Heath occupied in the ‘war against global warming,’ given that the Telegraph titles have spent decades in the climate-denial camp. From his privileged position of comfort and wealth, he added: ‘Yes, climate change will inflict many well-rehearsed costs on Britain, and there will be plenty of losers, but it is pointless seeking to prevent the inevitable.’ And: ‘It’s time to accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and whenever possible, even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate.’ Capitalism, the very system of planet-devouring economics that brought us here, will, Heath confidently proclaimed, ‘drive down emissions, when the time and, crucially, price are right.’ He continued: ‘Without minimising the severe downsides of global warming, especially on some [sic] poorer nations, many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers... construct more pools…plant more Mediterranean vegetation.’ Jason Hickel, an economics anthropologist professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, noted of Heath’s article: ‘This grotesque headline is from the Telegraph. 3,000 people in Britain have been killed in heatwaves this year so far. 20,000 in Europe. ‘Even if Britain did get to “embrace Mediterranean life”, what about the actual Mediterranean, what do they get to embrace? What about India?’ Hickel added: ‘The indifference of the British elite toward mass suffering is astonishing.’ As for ‘the despicable con that is net zero’, it is a basic law of physics that to stop global warming, humanity has to cut net emissions of global-warming gases to zero. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who sounded the climate alarm to US Congress in 1988, said three years ago that ‘we are damned fools’ for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis. According to Hansen, there is a huge amount of global heating ‘in the pipeline’ because of the continued burning of fossil fuels. Moreover, he argued, the Earth is ‘very sensitive’ to the impacts of this; far more sensitive than the best estimates presented by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said: ‘We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain [in burning fossil fuels]. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.’ Hansen added: ‘We are in the early phase of a climate emergency. Such acceleration is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium.’ A new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that global warming has accelerated sharply since 2015. Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the study’s co-authors, warns that: ‘How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.’ In his Telegraph piece, Heath adopted a classic diversionary tactic: blame China and growing nations of the Global South: ‘All of our efforts at carbon reduction (and those of the European Union) have been offset many times over by the increase in Chinese emissions; Britain could return to the stone age and cut our GDP to zero, and it would still make only a trivial difference.’ He continued: ‘Even a global government would not have enforced net zero. Forget worthless treaties: such a body would have been controlled not by Western eco-warriors but by a coalition of Chinese, Russian, Indian, African and South American powers desperate for growth.’ Heath neglects to mention the great strides that China, for example, is taking in boosting its renewable energy capacity and decarbonising its economy. Moreover, many climate scientists disagree with cynical attempts to whitewash Britain’s historical responsibility for global warming since the Industrial Revolution. Dr Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist and board member of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit UK organisation conducting independent research and analysis on energy and climate, said: ‘The climate crisis is a global problem and every country should be acting to reduce emissions and build a greener global economy, especially those with the largest historical responsibility, like the UK. The climate doesn’t care where carbon comes from – whether [it’s] from multiple countries responsible for smaller proportions of emissions, or China.’ She added: ‘The UK may account for just 1% of current global emissions, but we’re responsible for 100% of our own emissions, and we have the opportunity to show global leadership by bringing them down.’ While Heath pines for a mythical Mediterranean lifestyle, soaking up sunshine and sangria by his pool, in the real world the Mediterranean will increasingly suffer ever more intense and persistent heatwaves of over 40C, with extensive wildfires forcing people to flee from their homes. In Britain, the hard reality is that we could face food shortages this year after severe droughts in parts of England, as well as climate-driven crop failures in major importing countries. Heath’s article suffered such a severe public backlash that the original title of: ‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’ was later changed to: ‘We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero’ One of our X followers asked if we could fathom Heath’s mindset. We pointed out the famous dictum by the US writer Upton Sinclair: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ Meanwhile, Andy Burnham, the putative saviour of the genocide-participating Labour government, has maintained a stoic silence over the summer’s European wildfires and wider climate breakdown. Instead, he has promised he will take a ‘pragmatic’ approach to oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. The dictionary tells us ‘pragmatic’ means: ‘dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations’. There is, of course, nothing ‘sensible’, ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ about burning yet more oil and gas, raising carbon emissions and global temperatures, and leading to ever-greater climate emergency death tolls. Burnham says that: ‘There is a resource there [in the North Sea]. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that.’ He would like us to believe that being ‘pragmatic’ is about helping the ordinary man and woman in the street, not the billionaire oil giants like Shell who have just posted profits of £7.37 billion for the April-to-June period, double last year. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party in England and Wales, condemned Burnham’s comments: ‘Allowing new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea will worsen the climate breakdown, putting more lives at risk and doing untold damage to our economy. It’s not too late for Burnham to do the right thing and commit to leaving dangerous fossil fuels in the ground.’ Compare Burnham’s version of reality with that described a few years ago by Noam Chomsky: ‘I don’t know what word in the language - I can’t find one - that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal - the existence of organised human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’ DC & DE Note to our readers David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027. Media Lens was 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others. New alerts and cogitations are now available as podcasts on Substack, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jul 14

    25 Years Of Media Lens – The BBC’s Paul Adams On Iran

    Audio narration by Matt Alford This month marks the 25th anniversary of Media Lens. Still in short trousers, we sent our first media alert to a handful of readers on 9 July 2001. For a long time, our alerts focused on challenging journalists directly by email, publishing their responses, and encouraging readers to politely respond with their own views. One of the most positive exchanges involved the BBC’s diplomatic editor Paul Adams. From his news reports, we had always got the impression that Adams was a decent, amiable guy. And so it proved when we emailed him in January 2007: ‘Dear Paul ‘Your online piece today is curious. You write:‘“Tony Blair insists Britain must continue to show its willingness to launch military interventions for humanitarian purposes after he leaves office.” ‘Why do you take at face value Tony Blair’s argument that military interventions are “for humanitarian purposes”? Why did you not write, instead:‘“...to launch military interventions for what he calls ‘humanitarian purposes’...”?‘Likewise:‘“We can pursue climate change, world poverty and the Middle East peace process while still being able and willing to project British military power, in the interests of British and global security.”‘Again, why do you take at face value Blair’s argument that projecting military power is “in the interests of British and global security”?’ ‘Why is your piece – supposedly from an objective, nonpartisan perspective – in fact couched in propagandistic terms? ‘I hope you will respond, please. ‘Best wishes ‘David Cromwell Adams replied: ‘Dear David,‘Thanks for your comments, and you’re absolutely right that the piece should have appeared with rather more in the way of editorial distance. I don’t - and shouldn’t appear to - take a partisan view one way or the other.‘All I can say in my (rather feeble) defence is that the first paragraph, which appears in bold on the page, was not written by me at all but by the OnLine team, presumably as a kind of “headline” or explainer for the piece to follow. I agree that it would certainly have read better with the sort of caveat you describe.‘As for the second, I think I assumed (wrongly, perhaps) that the reader would see it as an extension of the previous paragraph, in which I set out Blair’s view of what he’s about. Again, it would have benefitted from some added distance.‘The piece was, I admit, written in a hurry on a day when I was flitting between one live broadcast and the next. In fact, what the OnLine team tend to do in these cases is to transcribe things they hear me saying during lives and thread them together as a kind of “authored” piece. I don’t care for the method, as live remarks are rarely as considered or articulate as properly written ones (as one Andrew Gilligan once rather disastrously illustrated!). This piece was a mixure [sic] of transcription and writing - and probably suffered as a result.‘Apologies. ‘Best ‘Paul Adams’ This was an eminently reasonable response, topped off with an actual apology. Adams was clearly open-minded and able to respond with genuine humility. The exchange seemed to vindicate our strategy of politely engaging with journalists. Perhaps they would be willing to listen and change. And after all, even small changes could make a difference. Alas, as we have since learned, Upton Sinclair’s famous observation did not tell the whole story: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ (Upton Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked,’ Oakland Tribune, 11 December 1934) In fact, we have found that people can understand salary-unfriendly truths, and they can then go straight back to behaving as if they had never understood at all. Discussing his famous study of obedience, psychologist Stanley Milgram warned: ‘With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the [authority’s] definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.’ (Stanley Milgram, ‘Obedience to Authority’, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.141) The Missing War Crime Last week, before the latest tit for tat airstrikes, Adams commented on Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran: ‘Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.’ By focusing on ‘the issues that led to war’, Adams gave the impression that political pressures had escalated to a point where war happened in an almost natural, inevitable way. He led readers away from the reality that the US and Israel opportunistically waged a war of choice on Iran in the middle of peace negotiations. Certainly, no serious analyst has suggested that ‘issues’ were leading Iran to declare war on the US or Israel. The ‘issue’ that actually ‘led to war’ was Trump’s willingness to fulfil Netanyahu’s dream of combining US and Israeli military might to again overthrow the Iranian government as the US and Britain had done in 1953. Netanyahu said: ‘This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I promised – and this is what we shall do.’ The promise to ‘smite… hip and thigh’ was a reference to a biblical idiom indicating a plan for total, merciless destruction. Adams’ version self-censored the unarguable truth that the attack that began on 28 February was a textbook example of a war of aggression, the supreme war crime. By contrast, in the Guardian, Julian Borger described the war as ‘an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public’. How in reviewing the history of the conflict could Adams not make the same point? How can this key truth of the war go unmentioned? The words ‘crime’ and ‘illegal’ did not appear in his piece. The answer is that the war’s illegality is deeply embarrassing to the UK state’s leading US and Israeli allies – the truth paints them as the rogue states they really are, which is the exact opposite of the salary-friendly impression reflexively communicated by the BBC. Adams added: ‘The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran.’ Khamenei was not merely ‘killed’; he was assassinated in the middle of peace negotiations. General Sir Richard Shirreff, a retired British Army officer and former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, explained that Khamenei held absolute religious authority for Shiite Muslims worldwide - not just political power in Iran - and that assassinating him, especially during Ramadan, was like ‘murdering the Pope on the steps of St Peter’s during Holy Week’. Adams’ reference to ‘devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes’ suggests these were merely tactical attacks – perhaps part of a long-term tit for tat pattern - rather than a maximum effort to ‘smite the terror regime hip and thigh’. The US committed fully 40-50% of its air power, on a par with the US-UK Iraq wars of aggression in 1991 and 2003. Adams continued: ‘Back in January, Iran was wracked by popular protest which both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted might herald the collapse of the Islamic Republic.’ It is not reasonable to present the unrest as simply a ‘popular protest’. On December 29 last year, The Jerusalem Post reported: ‘On Monday, the Mossad [Israeli secret service] used its Twitter account in Farsi to encourage Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it will join them during the demonstrations. ‘“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote. ‘It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”’ Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of State, posted on X: ‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…’ We can find no record of Adams ever mentioning these astonishing admissions. No doubt there was a ‘popular’ element to the protests, but history will surely judge that this was Phase 1 of ‘Operation Epic Fury’ and ‘Operation Roaring Lion’, as the 28 February ‘hip and thigh’ campaigns were termed by the US and Israel, respectively. Adams added: ‘Iran’s economy was already in tatters after decades of international sanctions. The country was also still badly wounded after a 12-day war with the US and Israel six months earlier.’ Sanctions have indeed left Iran’s economy in ‘tatters’. But why did Adams make no attempt to communicate the reality of what that means? In fact, it is a devastating form of siege warfare waged on the civilian population of Iran. In March 2021, the academic journal Foreign Affairs reported: ‘To judge from Iran’s Households Income and Expenditure Survey, administered by the Statistical Center of Iran, the country’s absolute poverty rate rose by 11 percent between March 2018 and March 2020, while the average living standard dropped by 13 percent nationally. The national currency lost almost one-fourth

  6. Jun 24

    Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy

    On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was given a largely respectful farewell by the ‘mainstream’ media, portraying him as a ‘decent’ man who put his country first. And now the same news organisations are burnishing Andy Burnham’s credentials to enter 10 Downing Street without actually submitting his record or policies to proper scrutiny. Starmer’s appalling record as Prime Minister was barely touched upon in his political obituaries. In particular, his complicity in the Gaza genocide was virtually whitewashed out of existence; notably by the BBC and the Guardian. But first, consider this selective overview of his two years in power since his ‘landslide’ victory at the 2024 General Election. (With just one-third of the electoral vote, fewer than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in both 2017 and 2019, Starmer’s Labour won around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats because of the absurd first-past-the-post UK voting system): * On his election as PM, Starmer ditched the ten pledges he’d made during his Labour leadership campaign which had deceptively presented him as a left-leaning, progressive successor to Corbyn whom he had called his ‘friend’. * He attempted to court right-wing Reform voters by adopting the language of the notorious Enoch Powell in warning that ‘mass immigration’ had done ‘incalculable damage’ to the British economy, and that the UK could become an ‘island of strangers’. * He attacked pensioners, people with disabilities, families on low income with more than two children (until he did a U-turn following a huge public backlash), and migrants. * Against strong advice, he appointed Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as UK ambassador to the US. * He waged war on the left wing of the Labour Party, suspended Jeremy Corbyn and many others, including numerous Jewish members. * He undermined trial by jury and, unjustly extending the definition of ‘terrorism’, proscribed Palestine Action and oversaw the arrests of more than 3,000 peaceful protesters, many of them elderly or with disabilities, opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. * He continued to arm and support Israel during the genocide despite his obligations under the Genocide Convention to take immediate action to prevent it, welcomed Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who had used genocidal language against the Palestinians in Gaza, approved visits from Israeli military officials and thwarted calls for a ceasefire. He also allowed the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus to be used for spy flights over Gaza, sharing intelligence with Israel that was likely used to attack targets in Gaza. * Infamously, he even declared in a live radio interview with Nick Ferrari that Israel ‘has that right’ when asked about Israel denying electricity and water to Palestinians in Gaza and, days later, tried to gaslight the public that he had not actually said that. The list could go on and on. As Peter Oborne, author of ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, rightly noted of Starmer: ‘Incredibly, he leaves office without accusing Israel of ever committing war crimes.’ No tears were shed by Starmer in his ‘emotional’ Downing Street speech for the more than 73,000 Palestinans killed in Gaza, including at least 21,289 children, since 7 October 2023. This week, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank. In December 2024, Amnesty International published a detailed report that explained the meaning of genocide: ‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis) Amnesty added a key clarification: ‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”. In its submission to the International Court of Justice against Israel, South Africa presented a detailed legal case that Israel has committed genocide. This case has been backed by other states at the ICJ who have published their own findings of genocide. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, reached similar conclusions in two reports in 2024: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ and ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’. In 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that Israel ‘has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination’. Moreover, many of the world’s leading scholars on genocide, including Israeli experts, have determined that Israel has committed genocide. The evidence is simply overwhelming. Diverting Readers’ Attention Away From The Genocide The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer (‘Slán Keir’). For example, the Independent mentioned that Kneecap released the single ‘Liars Tale’ earlier this year where they criticised Sir Keir’s stance on, as the paper put it, ‘Israel’s military offensive in Gaza’, thus avoiding use of the accurate word, ‘genocide’. Another mention of Gaza appeared in the Daily Telegraph where associate editor Gordon Rayner noted: ‘As early as September 2024, in his first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir gave the country a taste of the blunders to come when he called for the return of “sausages” from Gaza rather than hostages.’ That was a safe mention of ‘Gaza’ for the right-wing paper. Only 11 of the 30 mentions of ‘Starmer’ and ‘Gaza’ also contained the word ‘genocide’. Recall, this is out of a total of 1,485 newspaper mentions of Starmer in the 24 hours after his resignation. One such mention was in the Herald in Scotland quoting Green Party leader, Zack Polanski: ‘The vested interests that are holding this country back need to be confronted, with wealth taxes on the super-rich, utilities taken into public ownership, rent controls and affordable housing, and an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. ‘We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham might [be] going to show up in Downing Street.’ That the Gaza genocide barely registered in media coverage of Starmer’s departure from Downing Street is utterly damning of the insular, power-hungry nexus of the British political-media establishment. The Guardian’s ‘big hitter’ and resident Zionist Jonathan Freedland devoted around 2,000 words to the question, ‘the rise and fall of Starmer: where did it all go wrong?’. Notable features of his piece: Mentions of genocide? Zero. Mentions of Gaza? Zero. Mentions of Israel’s crimes? Zero. It takes real dedication to divert readers’ attention from Starmer’s complicity in all of the above. Meanwhile, Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, uncritically cited analysts declaring that foreign policy was an ‘area of relative strength’ for Starmer. Mark Curtis, co-director and co-founder of Declassified UK, was scathing: ‘The Guardian is such trash.’ In similar vein, Guardian political correspondent Alexandra Topping had a piece on the departing PM’s record with a section titled, ‘Success: Starmer the international statesman’. Once again, there was no mention of Gaza. BBC News performed its usual establishment role too, steering clear of awkward mentions of the Gaza genocide; not least on BBC News at Ten on the day of Starmer’s resignation speech. Ben Chu of BBC Verify presented an overview of ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership in six charts’. None of these charts depicted the deaths, injuries or devastation wreaked by Israel in Gaza, with Starmer’s complicity. In fact, there was not a single mention of genocide, Gaza or Israel. Propaganda by omission is, of course, a dominant feature of BBC News. In an extensive piece titled, ‘Sir Keir Starmer: Top lawyer whose “Mr Rules” approach failed to connect with the public’, BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide. This omission is particularly glaring because one of the many reasons that Starmer is deeply unpopular with much of the public is his complicity in Israel’s massive crimes against humanity. For example, in 2025, an Opinium poll tracker found that 45 per cent of the British public explicitly disapproved of Starmer’s handling of ‘the Israel-Gaza conflict’. In particular, sup

  7. Jun 4

    Invitation To A Turkey Shoot – How To Debunk Climate Denial

    We, of course, post on all kinds of emotive and controversial issues on social media: genocide in Gaza, the war of aggression on Iran, the weaponisation of anti-semitism to undermine democratic choice and defend Israel, and so on. Perhaps because we don’t post out of anger and hate, we don’t generally receive a lot of hostility in response. Remarkably, the one issue that is all but guaranteed to generate snarling dismissals and abuse is climate change. Discussion of highly sophisticated and complex climate science has become a ‘populist’ cause among people raised on a diet of trashy tabloids and hard-right politics (Reform, Restore, MAGA). Their passionate conviction: climate scientists and ‘alarmist’ politicians are faking data to secure research grants and tyrannical control of society. With great, mocking confidence, scientists are accused of the most childish errors – like all ‘Bad Guys’ they are as stupid as they are corrupt. On 26 May, the Met Office posted on X: ‘Today is now the hottest day in May on record with Heathrow and Kew Gardens provisionally reaching 35.0°C. ‘Until yesterday the highest temperature in May was 32.8°C, but we’ve now exceeded that record on consecutive days by a full two degrees Celsius.’ The Met Office emphasised the ‘full two degrees’ because in the last century records have usually been broken by tenths or hundredths of a degree. Despite what many people appear to believe, this spring was actually the warmest on record for England and Wales. The last three years are the top three warmest on record. Nine of the top ten warmest springs have been since 2007. Paul Hudson, a BBC meteorologist and climate correspondent, posted: ‘EVERY weather station, both rural & urban, in Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, set a new May temperature record yesterday. ‘Unprecedented. ‘For the climate sceptics out there, the game is up. Go and bore someone else with your nonsense.’ Nahel Belgherze, who focuses on extreme weather events worldwide, commented over a graph: ‘Hard to believe I’m even writing this. ‘Meteorological summer hasn’t even begun, yet Paris, France has already logged more days above 32°C (89.6°F) than its annual average.’ Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay), posted a map of shattered temperature records in France that also contained this comment: ‘A totally HISTORICAL day. ‘334 monthly records were SIMULTANEOUSLY broken this afternoon in France. Never in the history of climatology have so many records fallen all at once.’ Nevertheless, in response to the latest heatwaves, the BBC featured the following responses from two male beachgoers: ‘I just love it, just bring it on! More, more...! If this is what global warming means, don’t want the other stuff, but lovely temperatures like this is good.’ The second interviewee agreed: ‘Gotta make the most of the sunshine. You can’t complain about it; it’s not here for long enough, is it? So, yeah, make the most of the sunshine; come down by the sea and enjoy it.’ In 2022, Saffron O'Neill, Professor in Geography at the University of Exeter, led a study which investigated the visual reporting of heatwaves over the summer of 2019 in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. The conclusion: ‘Many visuals were positively valenced (in contrast to article texts), framing heatwaves as “fun in the sun”. The most prevalent type of images in all countries were photographs of people having fun in or by water. When images did depict the danger of heat extremes, people were largely absent.’ Professor Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University responded to an article on the BBC website: ‘This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK’s extreme heat this week. ‘As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that. ‘First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence. ‘And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous. ‘In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.’ Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, was more direct: ‘”Climate change is believed to have played a role in such hot spells as this” ‘FFS BBCNews ‘Belief has nothing to do with it. This is hard, scientific, fact ‘When will you get this right?’ Carbon Brief, a UK-based website specialising in the science and policy of climate change, found that despite blanket news coverage of the record heat in media outlets across western Europe, there has been ‘relatively little commentary from their opinion pages’: ‘No major UK newspapers have published editorials about the heat and there has been no space dedicated to it in the comment sections of the largest French and Spanish newspapers. ‘One exception in UK media was the Daily Mail’s climate-sceptic columnist Richard Littlejohn writing an article mocking heat-safety measures and warnings issued by the Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).’ Fiddling The Figures Alas, many social media posters were unimpressed by claims of record temperatures. Gregory Davis offered us some unsolicited advice on X: ‘Remove your lens from your a*****e.’ Christopher Talbot questioned the source of the measurements: ‘Are those measurements from real stations or your imaginary ones?’ This is a popular theme – for obscure, nefarious reasons, temperature readings are distorted to inflate the results. Thus, Paul Dakers, ‘Ex Army and an ex District Councillor’, explained in his reply to Talbot: ‘They measure them at the end of airport runways apparently - not surprisingly it’s quite warm there with all the heat coming out of the plane engines, supposedly it helps the planes fly or something’ Scientists are just that corrupt, or stupid, or both. Someone called Lady Windermere concurred: ‘They use ground temperatures near tarmac and enclosed buildings to get the most out of their scam stats’ Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, offered a correction: ‘The UK’s hottest ever May Day was recorded at Kew Gardens. Next to plants. Does anybody still take this climate change denial seriously?’ An incredulous tweeter saw the absurdity: ‘It’s a green house’ To be honest, like many people, we didn’t know where the weather station is located in Kew Gardens, and would likely not have had the time or inclination to find out in answering one of the endless flood of denier claims. So, we asked AI. From its cogent answer, linked to highly credible sources that we could easily check, we wrote this response: ‘The measuring station is situated in the middle of a wide, open lawn. It’s deliberately sited far enough away from walls, concrete paths and greenhouses to ensure they don’t inflate the readings.’ It took us a couple of minutes, and the poster had no answer. We understand that, like much technology, AI is a double-edged sword consuming yet more energy and posing huge potential risks for society. Last year, global datacentres used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world. Perhaps unwittingly, anyone accessing Google searches and social media like X, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or shopping online, is using AI. The same is true of anyone using email spam filters, or playlist curating on Spotify and Netflix, and so on. If much of this use of AI involves a grotesque and unjustifiable waste of energy, the one justifiable use of this new technology, we would argue, is asking simple text questions to challenge and debunk climate denier propaganda. It is a tool that changes the balance of power against the propagandists – the result is a rout, an intellectual turkey shoot. Given that it is far less energy intensive, and far more vital, than standard online habits like streaming video and video conferencing - which many of us indulge without a thought - then perhaps this is one of the few uses of AI that is acceptable. What is so staggering about the frequency of scepticism about UK temperature measurements is that records are, of course, constantly being shattered all around the world. In January, Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation, indicated the scale of this: ‘We conclude that 2025 was the third warmest year on Earth since 1850. It is exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. This period, since 1850, is the time when sufficient direct measurements from thermometers exist to create a purely instrumental estimate of changes in global mean temperature. Berkeley Earth’s analysis combines 23 million monthly-average thermometer measurements from 57,685 weather stations with ~500 million instantaneous ocean temperature observations collected by ships and buoys. ‘The last 11 years have included all 11 of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record, with the last 3 years including all of the top 3 warmest.’ (Our emphasis) Are these 23 million measurements from 57,685 weather stations all being faked in pursuit of some dark Orwellian agenda? The idea is simply pathological. Of course, many of the deniers popping up on social media are fossil fuel industry ‘astroturf’ (propaganda operations made to look like a genuine, grassroots movement). In 2020, a major study from Brown University analysed millions of tweets. They found that bots were responsible for roughly 25 per cent of all tweets about climate change. On days with big climate announcements, bot activity surged even higher, promoting denialist talking

  8. May 19

    Media Myopia As We Hurtle Towards Climate Oblivion

    Audio narration by Matt Alford Any aliens who have been monitoring radio and television transmissions streaming outwards into space from Planet Earth over the past few decades will likely be intrigued, bemused or simply horrified at humanity’s headlong drive towards climate catastrophe. No matter the urgent warnings from climate scientists, the power of billionaires, financial speculators and corporations maintains a death-like grip on governments around the world. Amid the occasional flurry of big business greenwashing and government rhetoric about ‘climate protection’ and ‘eco-friendly’ initiatives, billions of people are being held hostage by the forces that are dragging everyone to the edge of the climate abyss. New warnings about climate change do, of course, occasionally appear in the press. But rarely, if ever, are there prominent and sustained front-page headlines and news-leading television coverage. Rarer still are impassioned editorials, high-profile presenters and commentators demanding the substantive, radical changes that are needed to avoid the most damaging predicted impacts of business as usual. Earlier this month, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a 100th birthday party for naturalist David Attenborough, Britain’s most beloved broadcaster. Celebrities showered him with love and praise: Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Emily Eavis, Chris Martin, Ben Fogle, Raye, Kate Winslet. And Paddington Bear. Attenborough sat in the royal box, alongside Prince William. King Charles delivered a handwritten message from Balmoral Castle via a ‘cavalcade of creature couriers’, including eagles, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, otters, ducks, a fox and deer, thanks to the wonders of CGI. All very nice; all very Disneyfied. For many years now, Attenborough has been warning about the dangers of mass consumption, pollution, worldwide species loss and global warming. These subjects are clearly of great concern to him, although he started ringing the alarm bell very late. But the evening gave a wide berth to such uncomfortable topics. ‘Life on Earth’? The climate crisis must be happening on a different planet entirely. As Jonathan Liew, a Guardian sports journalist and columnist, pointed out: ‘This is, of course, the Attenborough with which our public discourse is most comfortable: depoliticised, universally adored, a man-sized Paddington Bear fit only for our veneration. Who teaches us about tree frogs and seal cubs and stick insects and asks for nothing in return.’ Of course, what Liew called ‘public discourse’ is the tightly constrained media space permitted by state and corporate power. Liew continued: ‘And perhaps there are more difficult questions to negotiate here: the extent to which he has been a force for the meaningful and revolutionary change he seeks, and the extent to which his broad, inoffensive appeal has been more hindrance than help, allowing the powerful to feign concern for the planet while shirking the tough and bloody compromises required to secure it.’ To his credit, Attenborough has been eloquent and impassioned in recent years about the climate crisis. He addressed the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, saying that: ‘We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking. This story is one of inequality, as well as instability. Today, those who’ve done the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit. Ultimately, all of us will feel the impact, some of which are now unavoidable.’ But, even five years on, as the climate crisis worsens, the topic was deemed unmentionable by the organisers of Attenborough’s 100th birthday party. ‘Hothouse Earth’ And Collapsing Currents In February, a new scientific report warned that runaway global warming is closer than had previously been thought. We are heading for the ‘point of no return’ after which we would be locked into a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’. Climate ‘tipping points’ would be triggered, producing rapid heating, which would lead to a domino effect of yet more tipping points and feedback loops. These include the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, drastic dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the weakening, and possible shutdown, of the Atlantic ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The scientists stated that: ‘Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia.’ The world has already experienced a global average temperature rise of over 1.3C since pre-industrial times and is likely to surpass the Paris Agreement ‘limit’ of long-term average heating of 1.5C in the next few years. Current government and business policies are pushing us towards 2-3C of global warming, if not more, by 2100. But, if trigger points are breached and runaway global warming occurs, we are talking about much higher temperature rises, perhaps 10C or more. This would mean almost unimaginable catastrophic effects on the climate system, global agriculture and societal infrastructure; not to mention the extinction of humans. Scientists have warned that even a rise of 3-4C means that ‘the economy and society will cease to function as we know it’. Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, put things in grim perspective via X: ‘We are already locked-in to a return to Pliocene [around 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago] conditions (3C hotter and (eventually) ~ 20m sea-level rise) ‘Keep going as we are, and hotter Miocene [5.3 to 23 million years ago] conditions will result ‘Beyond this a return to early Eocene [around 48 to 56 million years ago] hothouse beckons - and potential oblivion’ During the Eocene, the global average temperature was well over 10C higher than present. Oblivion would hit humanity long before such a temperature rise occurred. Earlier this month, yet another deeply disturbing scientific study revealed that the risk of AMOC reaching a tipping point by 2100, after which its shutdown would be inevitable, is as high as 50 per cent. Previously, this was considered ‘a low likelihood event’ of around five per cent. But even this should be held in perspective. How many of us would board a plane knowing that there was a five per cent chance that it would crash? AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, is a vital carrier of warm water from the tropics to high latitudes in the North Atlantic, returning cold water southwards. It is a primary source of heat for western and northern Europe, leading to the temperate climate here. AMOC connects with other ocean current systems in a global network that transports heat, water, nutrients and carbon around the planet. Any disturbance to AMOC, far less its collapse, would have devastating global consequences for climate, agriculture, infrastructure and even for the habitability of Earth. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who has studied AMOC for 35 years, said: ‘This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the “pessimistic” models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.’ He added: ‘I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that AMOC shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.’ To emphasise: the tipping point may be much earlier than 2100; it could happen by 2050, or even sooner. The vital point here is that scientists increasingly agree that the ‘safe window’ to stabilise the current by halting emissions is closing far faster than previously thought. And the public likely does not even realise it. Rahmstorf had previously said that a collapse must be avoided ‘at all costs’. Now he added: ‘I argued this when we thought the chance of an AMOC shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the AMOC switched to a different state.’ In an English-language video for the German DW news channel, Rahmstorf explained the importance of AMOC for European and global climate, and the significance of the latest alarming results. He warned that we should expect more climate extremes in heat, cold, drought, floods and storms. If and when the AMOC collapses, the impact on agriculture in the northern hemisphere will be devastating. The drop in harvest yields for key crops could be as high as 50 per cent. Mass starvation is a very real possibility. Climate Shocks A few days after the disturbing new AMOC report came out, Guardian columnist George Monbiot noted: ‘Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.’ Prior to Monbiot’s column in the Guardian, the paper had published a piece on the report by Damian Carrington, its environment editor. Two other UK national papers covered the study: the Daily Mail and the Independent. Channel 4 News covered the topic in a news broadcast. Amazingly, that was about it for the entirety of the establishment media. The fact that deeply disturbing findings about a likely collapse of a vital component of the climate system were not given wider, extensive and sustained coverage is a devastating indictment of ‘mainstream’ journalism. Even worse, when the report came out, the BBC preferred to push Reform-style propaganda about ‘migrants making false claims to stay in UK’. This was given prominen

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