Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

In 1997, Martin Durkin made a series, Against Nature, for Channel 4, which compared environmentalists … to Nazis … The Independent Television Commission’s verdict on the series was that 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.” That was exactly what happened to me.

Dr Ho also wrote in the same article:

What offended me most was not the attacks on my position, but the programme’s exploitation of the poor and starving in the Third World. Scenes of sick, starving children and subsistence farmers in Africa alternated with women from the Women against GMO Campaign lunching around a table or shopping for organic food.

Similar techniques were used in The Great Global Warming Swindle (see for example Comment 126, page 107 and Comment 130, page 111).

Durkin’s Links with the LM Group

The controversial LM Group evolved from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), but now appears to have an extreme libertarian, anti-environmentalist agenda (see Center for Media and Democracy: http://tinyurl.com/3xetqs and Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/ytnea5). It currently uses the online magazine, Spiked (www.spiked-online.com), and the Institute of Ideas (http://tinyurl.com/2mfnum) to promote its views: Spiked replaced LM Magazine when the latter was forced to close down following a libel suit against it by the UK broadcaster ITN (see Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/2zstjz and The BBC: http://tinyurl.com/2vmwbg).

Against Nature featured leading LM Group members Frank Furedi (aka Frank Richards), the founder of the Group (see Center for Media and Democracy: http://tinyurl.com/27h6xz); John Gillott (aka John Gibson); and Juliet Tizzard.

In addition, the assistant producer of Against Nature, Eve Kaye (aka Eve Anderson), is one of the principal coordinators of the RCP/LM Group (see Center for Media and Democracy: http://tinyurl.com/2wzojj). Her husband James Heartfield (aka James Hughes) helped write the RCP’s manifesto (see Center for Media and Democracy: http://tinyurl.com/23976n).

Although Durkin denies being a member of the LM Group, he recently confirmed his Marxist background in an interview with Spiked (see http://tinyurl.com/ yo4n5v); and his Channel 4 films have all demonstrated a very strong anti- environmentalist and pro-libertarian viewpoint (see for example Comment 136, page 114 and Comment 75, page 68). The first interview Durkin gave following the broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle was to Spiked magazine, on March 9, 2007 (http://tinyurl.com/yo4n5v). See also http://tinyurl.com/ynsab9 and http://tinyurl.com/23gnpe [Note: When this complaint was submitted, the link was to: http://tinyurl.com/25tb9q. However that web page no longer exists and the current link is to an archived copy of that web page, taken from Google cache, as it was on the date this complaint was submitted.] [Lobbywatch].

There would therefore appear to be sufficient grounds for stating that under Clause 5.8 of the Broadcasting Code, Channel 4 should have made clear to the audience that there is evidence of links between Durkin and the LM Group.