Swindled Again....

It was profoundly depressing to read some of the commentary about last night's Channel4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle. Most people - it seems - are happy to accept anything they are told without question. Until you read Reasic's excellent blog where he not only points out that most of the evidence presented in the programme was faulty, but that the programme maker - Martin Durkin - himself has a bad history of misrepresenting evidence and inventing conspiracies:-

"Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. No one would suggest that green claims should not be subjected to critical examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.

"The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.” Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology. After the series was broadcast, I discovered that the assistant producer and several of its interviewees worked for the right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as “Living Marxism”, which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the arguments Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM."

So there you have it - the great swindle was the programme itself .