BBC changes fracking story to help ‘deniers’

Published: May 8th 2012 – at 2:36 pm

BBC changes fracking story to help ‘deniers’

”this is typical BBC double think. Their mask of fairness slips every time they support the criminal British State”
$100917spfrack$ by Tim Fenton No matter how cautiously the words are phrased, and in spite of a range of caveats, when a former minister mentions the subject of shale gas live on the BBC, the hacks’ antennae twitch to attention and those words are instantly spun.

And the Beeb’s own report hasn’t helped matters, as it has relayed the sentiments of Chris Smith, who is now head of the Environment Agency.

Smith, recently elevated to the Peerage, has given cautious support to the extraction of gas from shale, but is by no means cheerleading:

shale gas would be “potentially very beneficial for our energy needs … it could provide energy security … it could be affordable”…. It has to be drawn out of the ground effectively and safely

Smith has stressed that this

means worrying about the way in which the drilling takes places, it means worrying about making sure the $fracking_natural_gas_drilling1$ methane is captured rather than discharged to the air and it means making sure that none of the contaminated water gets into the ground water that sometimes can fill our water supplies

He also talks of this being monitored and regulated “very rigorously. He also stressed that gas is still a fossil fuel, and that we have to develop carbon capture in the storage to enable us to reduce the greenhouse gas impact that it will have.

So if that’s a yes to fracking, it’s a very heavily qualified one. That degree of caution only increases the duty on media outlets not to get carried away.

But the Beeb has dropped the baton on the first changeover.

There it is in bold type. That’s not what the man said. But the example has been set, and the Maily Telegraph, home to such thoughtful and balanced luminaries as Christopher Booker and James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole, has already amended the BBC original to simply “Environment Agency boss backs fracking”….

BBC misrepresents gas story to help ‘deniers’ (liberalconspiracy.org)
Fracking poses risk to water systems, research suggests: U.S. study (vancouversun.com)

Author: thefreeonline

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