Claims by the Mail about the impact of changes to electricity prices on household energy bill in featured a little in "Media and Manipulation", a piece focussing on Murdochs deliberate misrepresentation of climate change issues. The Mail splashed headlines predicting £1000 a year plus energy bills.
Today "Carbon Brief" published evidence to show the Mail's claims were unverifiable
"The £1000 claim was sourced to a report produced by Unicredit Bank. When Carbon Brief investigated, we found that the report mentioned the figure just once and did not explain its underlying analysis. The £1000 figure – which is dramatically higher than other estimates – proved impossible to verify.
The report goes on to say:
"This is the second time in a few weeks that the Daily Mail has given significant prominence to figures on energy bills which have proved impossible to verify. In June the Mail’s warning that green measures are currently adding £200 to household energy bills proved to be based on unsourced claims by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). After we and others highlighted this, the Mail quietly stopped using the figure in favour of Ofgem's estimate of £100."
The main thrust of the GO article is that the right wing press have published misleading and untrue material that has seriously distorted public perceptions of climate issues - Carbon Brief give an example of just how damaging this can be.
"This week the Daily Telegraph also reported a poll carried out by the website Conservative Home, which asked 1,500 members of the Conservative party to identify the top three mistakes that David Cameron has made since he came into office in 2005. Number two on the list was “Supporting climate change policies that will increase energy bills
Full report "The Carbon Brief
BBC under fire
The BBC has been criticised for giving equal coverage to denier propaganda in the interests of balance. An independent report commissioned by the BBC trust concluded that in an effort to appear impartial when reporting on science the BBC had to make a distinction between an opinion and a fact. At times, when reporting on climate issues, opinion has been given the same weight as established scientific fact, meaning that viewers might perceive an issue to be more controversial than it actually is.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said it was crucial for the BBC to
"challenge inaccurate and misleading claims made by bloggers, campaigners and politicians who 'reject and deny the findings of mainstream science for ideological reasons.'...
..."The BBC is required by law not to sacrifice accuracy for impartiality in the coverage of controversial scientific issues such as climate change. Yet it is well known that there are particular BBC presenters and editors who allow self-proclaimed climate change 'sceptics' to mislead the public with unsubstantiated and inaccurate statements,"
In response the BBC have published new guidelines highlighting the need to consider the weight of arguments and to account for the difference between fact and opinion in science reporting
It's worth noting that the review praised the overall quality of BBC science reporting it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that BBC editors efforts to give equal weight to the opinion of deniers and overwhelming scientific consensus has been influenced by the Murdoch presses vitriolic anti BBC campaign
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