My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

Banish the BBC

By Bernie Reeves

The greatest danger to world security and sanity is not pan-Islamic terrorism, nuclear proliferation, Democrats or swine flu. It’s the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), specifically the state-owned network’s World Service on radio and television, that is targeting the US with a ramped up presence on the BBC America cable channel and regular broadcasts via National Public Radio.

For decades BBC News was proper and unaffected without the melodrama infecting media today. Alas, that is hardly the case now. The UK has fallen to the forces of mediocrity commensurate with the “leveling”of society that ignores achievement and emphasizes self-esteem.

In this environment, BBC News has descended into a hellish amalgam of political sloganeering, maudlin programming and incessant interviews with the least important people on earth: beggars in Calcutta, washerwomen in Yemen, cannibals in New Guinea, victims of genocide in Africa are the standard for man-and woman-on-the-street opinions. Obviously, the BBC fully subscribes to the manifesto of victimization that relies on sources with the least investment in the modern world.

But worse, the great leveling has banished “received pronunciation,” proper accents used by announcers until the 1990s. The new voices are often impossible to understand, bawling in Glaswegian, Midlands and Yorkshire accents. These annoying on-air personalities also bring attitude. Government officials are assaulted with accusatory insults; economists and scientists (unless they share the BBC party line) are treated like gangsters by this artificially empowered media elite.

Although excellent reports from remote regions filter through, BBC reporting consistently selects trivial and politically charged subject matter, creating an atmosphere supine to agendas. And that is why the BBC has become a danger to the world. Deep in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London are the hidden producers who pull the levers of the news-making machinery, delivering dispatches to their swaggering on-air factotums that global warming is fomenting the end of the earth’s existence.

Underneath the hourly news bulletins, there is a steady output of stories on the impending disaster. Obviously, the BBC opinion mongers adhere to the new school of thought that earnestly believes global warming is caused by mankind, not by natural forces and cycles. This dogma suffers no objectors. Man is the culprit, and Western capitalism is the engine destroying planet earth.

One BBC World Service program asks listeners to confess their environmental sins. Responses include: “I didn’t recycle this week”; “I increased my carbon footprint by driving more than I intended”; “I am purchasing too many consumer goods”; “I flew on an airplane that filled the atmosphere with jet fuel”; and on like that. In one episode of this trying program, the host switched to an interview with a mad scientist type, part of an activist group in the UK that demonstrates at Gatwick and Heathrow airports against jet travel. He has constructed an artificial rain forest in a Quonset hut in Lancashire where guilt-stricken Brits can experience the drama of nature without polluting the air with a visit to Brazil.

This intramural rain forest impresario commented: “Another thing outrages me: I drive through areas where each house has its own lawnmower. Why can’t they share one lawnmower? Why does everyone have to have his own? It would reduce the carbon footprint and help save the earth.”
There you have it. The environmental movement has evolved into a repository for socialist claptrap. But there was more. Our host aired an interview with the president of the Maldives, small islands in the Indian Ocean with a population of 300,000. The president said his nation would be under water in “about a hundred years” but that his people were doing all they could by adopting “green” policies to avert disaster. Then the kicker: “We are calling on the nations of the world to send us aid money to assist in our struggle to save our country.” He added: “We have a right to live here,” repeating the mantra that everyone has a right to everything these days — except he plans to rake in some cash as well, recognizing the global warming scare as the scam of a lifetime.

While the BBC is the international carrier of the virus of man-made global warming, the US holds its own in disseminating bogus dogma. The New York Times continues to emit infected microbes picked up by other papers and TV news who serve as carriers of the “gray lady’s” propaganda-based news flow. In this sick room, there is no counter theory to global warming. It is now accepted as doctrine. Arguments that the liturgy is questionable are scorned as heresy.

The Times carried a front-page piece stating that America’s military, intelligence and diplomatic savants are preparing for the world to decline into famine and warfare caused by man-made global warming. The sources for the story were climate agencies, not the Joint Chiefs — and in any case, strategic planners model for any future scenario possible. But the Times story was not written as a possibility; to them it was inevitable and factual. The story proves that the more theory is separated from reality, the more likely we are to fall for the big lie that the earth is on its last legs due to the depredations of its most advanced inhabitant.

The thing is, we’ve been here before, in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich wrote the specious book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich confidently predicted that high birth rates would bring famine and drought and war by the year 2000. That didn’t happen, but the book helped transform the perfectly sane practice of conservation into the “environmental” movement, now evolved into the fake global warming emergency of today that threatens to halt production and bring capitalism to its knees. Now mankind is the guilty party that murdered Mother Earth.

I’ve railed against Ehrlich in past columns (go to www.metronc.com). Despite being wrong in his predictions, his theories carry on today. Livescience.com circulated a news story recently suggesting Americans reduce their carbon footprint by having fewer kids. The Europeans who fell for this after Ehrlich’s book will tell you that decreasing birth rates for environmental theory leads to the extinction of entire races — as is happening to the Italians and Greeks today. This condition led to the importation of “guest workers” to make the wages to pay for the nanny state. In most cases these workers are Moslem.