Say Anything Blog

Back in March of last year, over in the Reader Blogs, an up and coming new blogger wrote on the British documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. Rob graciously linked to the video here.

Well, it’s back in the news again, after fifteen months, because of a complaint filed with “the UK’s media regulator”, which sounds a bit Orwellian, but it seems that British Channel 4 is to be censured for the way it represented some of the scientists in the documentary.  The Guardian has the details:

Watchdog finds documentary was unfair to scientists but did not mislead viewers

...it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.

...The Ofcom ruling is expected to find that Wunsch was misled about the tone and content of the programme, but that his views were accurately represented within it. Durkin, who had previously made other controversial documentaries, including Against Nature and the Rise and Fall of GM, vigorously defended the broadcast.

“The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong,” he wrote.

Channel 4 justified the broadcast by saying it was a useful contribution to a timely debate, arguing that it had a tradition for iconoclastic programming and had also aired programmes supporting the case for man-made climate change.

I wonder how Michael Moore would stand up if he were to be reviewed by a media regulator on the content of his docuimaginaries?

Cross Posted at Proof Positive