The British Palestinian Committee (BPC) and UK Gaza Community (UKGC) convened a press conference in London yesterday, bringing together healthcare workers and British-Palestinian voices to expose the scale of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza amid an enforced media blackout.
The event, held metres away from BBC Broadcasting House, aimed to break through the information vacuum created by Israel’s targeting of journalists and closure of the besieged Gaza Strip from the world. With 193 journalists killed since 7 October 2023 and systematic restrictions on media access, particularly in northern Gaza, evidence of massacres, mass executions and widespread destruction has largely fallen out of the news cycle.
The attacks in northern Gaza represent the most violent and brutal assaults in the history of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine, the organisers pointed out, as speakers prepared to share harrowing testimonies of death and devastation in the Gaza Strip.
Mai Annan, speaking via video link from Gaza where she leads the Reviving Gaza mutual aid project, provided a chilling account of Israeli military tactics. “We started hearing loudspeakers asking the men in the building to come out naked, then they asked the women and children to come out. They lined up the men, and the soldiers began firing at them randomly,” she recounted. “Many were killed, and some were wounded and left to bleed to death. Then they put all the women and children in one room and threw a gas grenade inside. It’s very clear to us that everyone is a target, and the plan is just to kill and kill more.”
They lined up the men, and the soldiers began firing at them randomly. Then they put all the women and children in one room and threw a gas grenade inside.
Dr Mahim Qureshi, a London-based vascular surgeon who recently returned in November after volunteering in Gaza detailed the catastrophic medical situation. “The types of injuries are predominantly blast injuries,” she explained, “but the degree of overcrowding and lack of hygiene, lack of antibiotics and high level of antibiotic resistance means people cannot fight basic infections.” She described how young girls arrived with gunshot wounds to the head, while doctors, lacking basic neurosurgical equipment, were forced to drill through skulls with inadequate tools in desperate attempts to save lives.
Hala Sabbah, the London-based coordinator of the Sameer Project aid group, explained how aid has been weaponised through systematic starvation. “Prior to the genocide 400-500 trucks entered Gaza, starting from October only 50 trucks were permitted,” she explained. “Zionists are collaborating with people on the ground to make sure these trucks are stolen. Not only are the number of trucks limited they are making sure it’s not reaching the victims. Palestinians pay thousands to buy the basic necessities.”
Dr Mohamed Ashraf, who worked in northern Gaza during the initial phase of Israel’s assault, shared devastating evidence of the targeting of medical personnel. He displayed photographs of murdered colleagues, speaking of Dr Mosab Sama, abducted from Nasser Hospital with no information about his whereabouts, and Dr Maisara Rais, killed and still buried under rubble with his family. Of his own family’s fate, he explained how he has been contacting hospitals to see if they received the bodies of his wife and daughter – their silence the only indication they might still be alive.
Ahmed Najjar, born in Jabaliya refugee camp, provided testimony of living there for 55 years before this assault. “This wasn’t just another military campaign,” he said, “this was an attempt to erase an entire people. North of Gaza is stripped of its humanity and its home.” His sister was told at gunpoint to abandon her son, while his brother watched helplessly. His father, older than the state of Israel, initially refused to move, saying he was tired of being displaced, before Israel’s relentless bombardment finally forced him to flee to Gaza City.
Dr Loai Nasir reported that 400,000 people remain besieged in northern Gaza, facing severe food insecurity as Israeli authorities consistently deny food deliveries. Ibrahim Assalia testified about the use of unknown chemical agents, describing how his father died after inhaling an Israeli substance. Speaking recently with his family, they told him “they are dying of hunger. People in north Gaza are feeding on grass and trees.”
The conference also unveiled new evidence of British complicity in Israel’s military campaign. A comprehensive report launched by the BPC detailed how British military infrastructure actively supports Israel’s assault on Gaza. Khem Rogaly explained that Britain’s military collaboration “goes far beyond licensing exports.” Britain’s global F35 programmes and export of components are essential for Israel to fly the F35 and bomb Gaza. British parts are central to the regular repairs needed to maintain Israel’s bombing campaign.
The human cost of Britain’s military support was further illustrated through testimony about the devastating medical situation in Gaza. Qureshi described how chronic illnesses are killing Gazans but their numbers are not added to the death toll. She noted that what she witnessed in the south could not compare to the horror unfolding in the north. Healthcare workers shared accounts of performing surgeries without anaesthesia, while Ashraf recounted doctors watching helplessly as patients died from treatable conditions due to lack of basic medical supplies. The toll on medical staff has been both physical and mental, with many forced to work through their own trauma while treating an endless stream of casualties
The systematic targeting of healthcare workers emerged as a recurring theme. According to figures presented at the conference, some 1,800 healthcare workers have been killed since October 2023, with 319 health workers currently detained by Israeli occupation forces. Ashraf spoke of being trained to deal with crises, but never having faced anything like this current situation, with no medical supplies reaching Gaza.
Sabbah detailed how the starvation of Gaza is being systematically engineered. To buy vegetables in northern Gaza now costs hundreds of dollars, she explained. “It’s not a famine,” she emphasised. “It’s manufactured starvation by Israel.”
“I’m not asking western leaders to see us as humans,” Najjar stated in his closing remarks. “Stop pretending, stop lecturing. We see through your hypocrisy. You think you can erase us – you will not, you will fail.”
The testimonies presented paint a harrowing picture of systematic destruction aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable. Speakers emphasised that while mainstream media attention has shifted elsewhere, the situation in northern Gaza continues to deteriorate, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing what the UN has described as catastrophic hunger.
The evidence presented of British military support for Israel’s campaign comes as legal experts increasingly warn that Israel’s actions constitute genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently investigating genocide charges against Israel following South Africa’s legal action, while the UN’s recent report found Israel’s military actions in Gaza to be consistent with genocidal intent. Amnesty International has joined a growing chorus of human rights organisations in concluding that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
The press conference highlighted how Israel’s media blackout serves to conceal the scale of destruction in Gaza from international scrutiny. Through harrowing firsthand testimonies, damning evidence of British military support and documented accounts of systematic starvation and medical deprivation, the event provided a devastating glimpse of the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
The article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The broadcaster’s in-house content studio has been paid to promote fossil fuel firms and petrostates with a history of persecuting journalists.
The BBC has produced dozens of films and articles for oil and gas companies, agricultural giants, fossil fuel states, and high-emission transport firms in recent years, DeSmog can reveal.
Experts say the BBC has been “greenwashing” the image of companies and countries contributing to global emissions by trumpeting their dubious climate credentials and promoting their favoured solutions to the crisis.
The content was produced by BBC StoryWorks, a studio that produces videos, podcasts, and articles paid for commercial clients, which it publishes on BBC channels outside the UK.
On its website, BBC StoryWorks boasts that it leverages the reputation of the BBC – “our century-long pedigree as the world’s most trusted storytellers” – to create content for commercial clients “that moves and inspires curious minds, across platforms and across the globe”.
BBC StoryWorks produces traditional adverts for its clients, as well as content “with an editorial style” (known as “branded” or “native” content).
Branded content appears outside the UK on the BBC website – the most viewed news platform in the world – and on its non-UK broadcast channels, in a similar format to normal editorial output. However, branded content promotes the paying client and typically features interviews with the client’s senior executives. It is only distinguished by a disclaimer that it has been paid for by an external organisation.
BBC Studios – which includes StoryWorks – generated £1.8 billion of sales in the year 2023/24, according to the broadcaster’s annual accounts. The BBC‘s financial deficit is projected to reach nearly £500 million next year, with the licence fee – its primary funding source – having been frozen for several years by the last Conservative government.
In recent months, the BBC has created content for a number of oil and gas companies, including the French fossil fuel company Engie, which owns a number of coal-fired power plants and relies heavily on gas for its energy production.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for liquified natural gas (LNG) companies, and has touted the energy source as a cleaner alternative to other fossil fuels. This is despite experts warning that the booming LNG industry could contribute more heavily to the climate crisis than the ongoing use of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Agriculture accounts for 21 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and BBC StoryWorks has produced films for some of the world’s biggest food and farming firms, including Nestlé and Bayer, often promoting the disputed green technologies backed by the industry. As previously revealed by DeSmog, BBC StoryWorks has produced dozens of documentaries sponsored by the pesticide giant Corteva, publicising the technologies developed and sold by the firm.
Petrostates with a history of human rights abuses – including the imprisonment of journalists – have also been promoted by BBC StoryWorks.
An investigation by DeSmog and Drilled previously revealed that many of the world’s most trusted English-language news outlets regularly promote the fossil fuel industry’s narratives on climate-related topics. Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post all have internal commercial studios that create advertising content for fossil fuel firms.
The BBC is committed to science-led climate reporting and in 2021 signed the Climate Content Pledge, promising to do “more and better climate story-telling on screen across all genres.”
However, critics say that BBC StoryWorks is using the broadcaster’s reputation – including its role as a public service broadcaster – to make money from commercial content that often flouts its editorial values.
“The contracts to make this sort of content are won on the back of the BBC’s reputation as an honest and impartial broadcaster,” Patrick Howse, the BBC’s former Baghdad bureau chief, told DeSmog. “Accepting money from sources like this, to make content like this, risks undermining the BBC’s own hard-won reputation and will ultimately put it on the wrong side of history.
“This is a huge disservice to the BBC’s audiences, and a betrayal of the many brave and conscientious BBC journalists around the world who see holding power to account and telling the truth as their raison d’etre.”
Last year was the warmest year since global records began in 1850. The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that “immediate and deep emissions reductions” are needed “across all sectors” to limit global warming to 1.5C – the global target established by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
In June 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that advertising agencies had “aided and abetted” the fossil fuel industry, “acting as enablers to planetary destruction”.
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand,” he said.
A BBC StoryWorks spokesperson said that the studio “operates entirely separately from the BBC’s editorial operations” and that its output “is clearly labelled as commercial content”.
However, content labelling doesn’t always help readers and viewers to understand that it has been paid for by a commercial client. A 2018 Boston University study found that only one in 10 people recognised native advertising – which includes branded content – as advertising rather than reporting.
The BBC StoryWorks spokesperson added that, “BBC StoryWorks operates under robust and established governance and is required to comply with the BBC’s guidelines as set out in the publicly available Advertising and Sponsorship Guidelines.
“Central to these guidelines is a commitment to factual accuracy in any piece of content. All of the content cited in this article was approved as compliant with the BBC’s advertising guidelines prior to its publication.”
Fossil Fuel Firms and False Solutions
In April and June, BBC StoryWorks published two articles paid for by Engie, a global energy company with annual revenues of $60 billion, which is part-owned by the French state. The articles promoted Engie’s green credentials, claiming it has a mission “to accelerate the energy transition”, despite the firm’s extensive fossil fuel interests.
Though ENGIE has ambitious renewable development objectives, it plans to expand its LNG terminals in Europe, is one of the top European developers of gas power plants globally, and has agreed to import American shale gas beyond 2040.
Between 2016 and 2022, the firm sold 16 of its coal plants – a 60 percent reduction in its coal capacity. However, Engie chose to sell these assets rather than close them down. This transferred the polluting plants to different owners, meaning that the plants will still contribute to global emissions.
The BBC StoryWorks articles didn’t provide information about the company’s existing polluting activities, or the global need to rapidly scale-down oil, gas, and coal production.
Professor Peter Newell, an academic at the University of Sussex specialising in environmental politics, told DeSmog: “Because branded content looks like regular BBC journalism which the public trust as independent, it compromises the integrity of the organisation and its public role, including to help society respond seriously to the climate crisis.”
In 2021, the broadcaster launched a “Humanising Energy” series “presented by” the World Energy Council, a global forum for sustainable energy development, followed by a second series in 2023.
The two series featured dozens of five-minute films paid for by individual firms, showcasing their supposed climate solutions. These films typically involved one-on-one interviews with people either creating or benefiting from these green innovations, as well as cinematic shots of the technologies being deployed.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film from its ”Humanising Energy“ series. Credit: BBC
Sponsors of films in the two Humanising Energy series included the fossil fuel companies Engie Brazil, Gasum (the largest distributor of LNG in the Nordic countries), CLP Holdings (which has said it won’t phase out its coal assets before 2040, and hasn’t committed to phasing out its gas assets), Mabanaft, and Invenergy, the energy services firm Voith, and the engine manufacturer Cummins.
All of these films touted the supposed climate credentials of the featured companies, without examining their contribution to global emissions or the viability of the featured technologies.
In January 2024, Cummins agreed to pay a record $1.7 billion fine – the second largest environmental penalty ever in the U.S. – after facing charges that it equipped roughly one million vehicles with devices that bypassed emissions sensors. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing.
Just a few months earlier, BBC StoryWorks produced a film for Cummins boasting of the firm’s efforts to help decarbonise commercial vehicles.
The Invenergy film focused on its construction of an LNG plant in El Salvador. While the content attempted to show how the plant was providing energy and jobs to the local community, it also tried to tout the environmental benefits of natural gas.
During the film, an Invenergy spokesperson suggested that natural gas generates 30 percent less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, neglecting the fact that natural gas is composed largely of methane, which is over 80 times more potent than CO2 across a 20 year period. Even relatively small methane leaks during the process of extracting, shipping, and processing natural gas contribute significantly to global emissions.
One of the films in the Humanising Energy series – “The evolution of home energy” – promoted the role of hydrogen in supplying home heating. Yet, while green hydrogen is widely accepted as necessary for decarbonising heavy industry and other sectors where alternative renewable energy sources are unworkable, it is not considered viable for heating homes.
A peer-reviewed assessment of over 50 independent studies in 2024 concluded that hydrogen use in domestic heating is inefficient, costly and resource-intensive compared to other low-carbon options such as heat pumps.
The BBC StoryWorks film was paid for by DNV, a Norwegian company that claims to be “the world’s leading resource of independent energy experts and technical advisors”, including the oil and gas sector. DNV says on its website that it “delivers broad technical expertise and experience to enable hydrogen to play a key role in the energy transition”.
A DNV spokesperson said that, “While DNV does work with oil and gas companies and organisations across renewable energy production, it is not involved in the direct production or distribution of energy… Our approach to energy solutions is rooted in comprehensive research and rigorous testing, and our position as an independent third party is a central part of our identity and our work.”
The Humanising Energy series also featured twofilms advocating for the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) – one paid for by the aviation giant Boeing, and one paid for by the energy and chemicals company Sasol alongside the gas company Linde.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Boeing, from its ”Humanising Energy“ series. Credit: BBC
SAFs have been criticised as being environmentally damaging and currently economically unviable. The Advertising Standards Authority this month banned a Virgin Atlantic advert for making the “misleading” claim that it had developed a “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel”.
In August 2022, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) said that the amount of money invested by airlines in SAFs was “insufficient” and that it seemed as though the technology was simply “about burnishing airlines’ images” by inflating their environmental credentials.
Sasol told DeSmog that its SAF initiatives were not an example of greenwashing and that it believes SAFs hold the “promise to be an enabler of our own decarbonisation and contribute to decarbonising aviation.”
Aviation contributes approximately 2.5 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, yet BBC StoryWorks has produced content for a number of airlines in recent months and years, including Uzbekistan Airways (March 2024), China Southern Airline (2022), and Korean Air (2017).
BBC StoryWorks has also worked extensively with other polluting transport companies.
It produced an advertising campaign for the shipping and cruise company Cunard that appeared on BBC StoryWorks social media pages in July 2024. Europe’s 218 cruise ships emitted as much sulphur oxides as one billion cars in 2022.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced brandedcontent for the car company Hyundai, as well as for Lexus, Volkswagen, and Jaguar. In addition, the studio has produced a six-part series paid for by the Indian multinational motorcycle company Royal Enfield.
Transport contributes roughly one quarter of all energy related greenhouse gas emissions, while outdoor air pollution is estimated to cause more than 3.2 million premature deaths worldwide every year.
“This important investigation reveals that BBC StoryWorks has been doing the greenwashing work of major polluting firms driving the climate crisis by obscuring their role and promoting their preferred ‘solutions’, however discredited by science,” Professor Newell told DeSmog.
Greenwashing is when a company falsely brands something as eco-friendly, green or sustainable. In 2017, the BBC itself produced a guide to the “seven ways to spot businesses greenwashing”.
Big Ag Polluters
BBC StoryWorks has also been paid to produce content for major agricultural polluters and their lobbyists. This content has often promoted the technological hacks that food and farming giants claim will reduce the sector’s emissions, rather than the more fundamental changes in production and consumption that scientists say will be crucial in limiting Big Ag’s climate impact.
In 2023, BBC StoryWorks produced an advertising campaign for the pesticides giant Bayer, the world’s second largest crop chemicals company, boasting of the firm’s efforts to facilitate “scientific breakthroughs”.
In addition, as part of a branded content series in late 2023 entitled “The Climate and Us”, BBC StoryWorks was paid by Bayer to produce a film on the digital apps helping farmers to monitor and reduce their emissions.
The film, which featured an interview with Bayer’s vice president of digital farming operations, promoted the firm’s technologies with no additional comment from experts on its efficacy, or Bayer’s stance on climate change.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Bayer. Credit: BBC
According to the Pesticides Action Network, over a third of Bayer’s sales derive from products that are highly hazardous to the environment, animal or human health. (The methodology for this classification is strongly disputed by Bayer on the grounds that it uses different criteria to internationally accepted rules).
Bayer told DeSmog that it is “committed to ambitious sustainability goals and has a positive track record while recognising the ongoing challenge.”
Experts say that the overuse of chemical pesticides is harming the future of food production. Biodiversity is in sharp decline across the world, and numbers of birds and pollinators are plummeting in Europe.
Bayer, which makes almost $10 billion in agrochemical sales every year, has also faced millions of dollars in lawsuits over health issues allegedly related to its products, including from farmers.
In 2023, DeSmog revealed that BBC StoryWorks had produced three documentary series and 26 articles – viewed at least 65 million times – sponsored by Corteva, one of the world’s largest pesticide firms.
The BBC said that the Corteva-sponsored content, which focused on sustainable food production, was editorial in nature and not influenced by its corporate client. However, experts said the documentaries gave a “totally biased” picture of global food problems, while the content promoted a number of the technologies developed by Corteva.
BBC StoryWorks also produced two articles in 2023 paid for by Australian Dairy – the country’s industry trade group.
The first article promoted the supposed contribution of milk and dairy to a healthy diet, while the second advocated for “precision farming” – in other words, using technology to ensure that resources are used efficiently and to track climate impacts.
Scientists and health professionals agree that dairy products are not necessary for a healthy diet, and they agree that for people who are able to have a varied diet, lower meat and dairy consumption is healthier than diets higher in milk and dairy.
Experts also doubt that precision farming can be rolled out widely enough to meaningfully reduce agricultural emissions. The environmental group Friends of the Earth has said that: “Faced with global climate and biodiversity emergencies, better ‘optimisation’ of existing production processes cannot possibly go far enough to meet the challenges we face.”
According to a March 2024 Harvard Law paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris Agreement. The report concluded that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50 percent during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead.
Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International told DeSmog: “Tinkering with the status quo is no longer an option. Meat and dairy companies are climate killers. The livestock sector is one of the leading sources of human-made methane emissions, which move us faster and further past the 1.5C threshold, worsening global heating.
“Meat and dairy companies must stop misleading the public with pseudo solutions and focus on reducing their livestock herds drastically to bring down emissions instead. This reduction can give us a fighting chance against climate chaos.”
In 2023, BBC StoryWorks also produced content for the world’s largest food and drink company Nestlé, boasting of the company’s efforts to support sustainable farming through “regenerative agriculture”.
The film failed to acknowledge that Nestlé – whose 87.5 million tonnes of annual emissions are similar to those of Chile – spent 14 times more on “marketing and administration” in the last year than it did on regenerative agriculture over the previous five years combined.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Nestlé. Credit: BBC
“Nestlé’s strong focus on using regenerative agriculture to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming – one of Nestlé’s main strategies to achieve net zero – is not backed by robust scientific evidence,” Nodzenski said.
“Increasing carbon storage in soils, as well as forests and other vegetation, is necessary, but should not replace a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming – one of the main sources of Nestlé’s emissions.”
The Nestlé film was part of a “Food for Thought” series backed by the trade body FoodDrink Europe, whose members feature major polluters including Cargill, Coca-Cola, and Unilever.
A Nestlé spokesperson said: “We continue to invest in and deliver on our net zero roadmap. By the end of 2023, we had reduced our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 13.5 percent in absolute terms since 2018. Our GHG reduction targets are third-party approved by the Science Based Targets initiative and include a 20 percent absolute cut by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030 covering all sources of agricultural emissions in our supply chain.
“We continue to ramp up our climate efforts using world class research and development, including via the Nestlé Institute for Agricultural Sciences.
“Nestlé has committed to invest $1.2 billion to pay premiums to farmers for ingredients grown using regenerative agriculture practices, provide technical assistance and support investment.”
Petrostates
Over recent years, BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for some of the world’s leading fossil fuel states, many of which have a poor record on human rights and press freedom.
This year’s flagship COP29 climate summit will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan. The country is a petrostate with oil and gas production accounting for roughly half of its GDP and over 90 percent of its exports. The country, run under an authoritarian system with little effective political opposition, plans to increase fossil fuel production by a third over the next decade.
Azerbaijan’s government has also been accused by of a media crackdown by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch ahead of November’s summit, arresting 25 journalists and activists in the past year.
However, since November 2023, BBC StoryWorks has produced several adverts promoting Azerbaijan as a place to visit, while greenwashing its image.
For example, in December 2023, the studio released an advert paid for by the country’s space agency Azercosmos, attempting to show “How digitisation is changing the game for Azerbaijan’s quest for renewable energy.”
The advert was accompanied by an article claiming that Azerbaijan plans to transition “from an oil- and gas-based economy into a thriving modern hub.” The article did not mention the country’s plan to expand fossil fuel production, which contravenes globally agreed efforts to limit rising temperatures.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks advert, sponsored by Azercosmos. Credit: BBC
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content promoting the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the host of the 2023 COP28 climate summit and another petrostate with a poor human rights record.
In 2023, the studio produced a branded content podcast series on behalf of Abu Dhabi Tourism, featuring five 20-minute episodes each “highlighting the message that Abu Dhabi [the capital of the UAE] is a destination for every kind of traveller”.
The series was shortlisted for a 2023 World Media Award and, in the award submission, the BBC said it “challenged preconceived notions and [positioned] the city as a cultural gem worth exploring”. The series was downloaded 115,000 times, according to the BBC.
The UAE derives roughly 40 percent of its income from oil and gas, and this isn’t the only time that BBC StoryWorks has produced content promoting the petrostate.
The story stated that the UAE is “planning to increase oil production to more than five million barrels a day by 2030”, but said that the country “has been looking toward more sustainable energy sources”. It went on to say that “Clean energy projects are coming of age” in the UAE, “from record-breaking solar parks and green hydrogen to waste-to-energy plants”.
The UAE’s overall climate action has been rated as “critically insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project that monitors government climate action and measures it against the Paris Agreement.
Weeks before COP28, the country’s national oil company, ADNOC, awarded contracts worth $17 billion for the development of new offshore gas fields.
The Gulf state also has a poor record on human rights and press freedom. The UAE continues to arrest and imprison activists, academics, and lawyers who speak out against its monarchic rulers. UAE authorities also continue to discriminate against women, LGBTQ communities, and migrants.
According to Reporters Without Borders, “The government prevents both local and foreign independent media outlets from thriving by tracking down and persecuting dissenting voices.”
“The rise of renewable energies in oil-rich regions” article also attempted to promote the ways in which “women are playing an increasing role in the renewable energy sector”. The story cited the fact that women are leading green initiatives in Kuwait, and Jordan.
However, many Gulf states routinely discriminate against women. In Kuwait for example, the country’s personal status laws discriminate against women in matters of marriage, divorce, and child custody.
Despite this, BBC StoryWorks has frequently promoted the country. In December 2023, the studio published an advert from the Kuwait Fund, the country’s state-run development agency, boasting of its efforts to help “disadvantaged regions, women and minorities”.
Reporters Without Borders states that Kuwait’s censorship laws prohibit journalists “from criticising the government, the emir, the ruling family, its allies or religion”. In particular, it is “difficult for journalists to tackle migrant worker rights, women’s rights and corruption.”
Oil and gas revenues account for roughly 60 percent of Kuwait’s GDP.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for the petrostate Qatar, promoting the country as a tourist destination despite its record of discriminating against women and minorities.
BBC StoryWorks has a history of working for repressive regimes, including China. The U.S. publication Deadline reported in December 2022 that BBC StoryWorks had partnered with at least nine Chinese state-affiliated bodies, including a media outlet banned from broadcasting in the UK.
“Those commissioning and paying for this content are deliberately using the BBC’s brand to greenwash or whitewash their own reputations. It’s an exercise of cynical manipulation,” the BBC’s former Baghdad bureau chief Patrick Howse told DeSmog.
“Commissions like this are lucrative and therefore attractive to a corporation that has been deliberately and severely financially squeezed by the UK government over a long period. This has forced the BBC to seek money from wherever it can find it, and this poses a risk to its editorial independence and honesty, which will ultimately undermine the trust of the BBC’s audience.”
Rupert Murdoch supports the Red Tories (UK Labour Party) and needs his nappy changed.Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
This month brought yet another record-breaking spate of flash floods and deadly heatwaves across the US. Yet, as a new study by Heated (6/27/24) reveals, despite ample reporting on these events, a majority of news outlets still did not link these events to their cause: climate change.
Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, writers for the climate-focused, Substack-based outlet, analyzed 133 digital breaking news articles from national, international and regional outlets reporting on this month’s extreme weather. Just 44% mentioned the climate crisis or global warming. Broken down by weather event: 52% of stories that covered heatwaves, and only 25% of stories that covered extreme rainfall, mentioned climate change.
As Atkin and Samuelson write, by now we know that climate change is the main cause of both extreme heat and extreme flooding. And we know the biggest contributor of climate-disrupting greenhouse gasses: fossil fuels, which account for about 75% of global emissions annually.
Still, the study’s authors found, only 11% of the articles they studied mentioned fossil fuels. Only one piece (BBC, 6/24/24) mentioned deforestation, which scientists say contributes about 20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. None mentioned animal agriculture, which the FAO estimates contributes about 12% of global emissions.
Stark omissions
The omissions were laughably stark: A New York Post piece (6/21/24) ended with a New Yorker and former Marine who said he’d been in “way hotter conditions”—in Kuwait and Iraq. An AP article (6/4/24) quoted the “explanation” offered by a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management: “It does seem like Mother Nature is turning up the heat on us a little sooner than usual.”
Heated recognized some outlets that consistently mentioned climate change in their breaking coverage of heat and floods this month. That list included NPR, Vox, Axios, BBC and Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Then there were the outlets whose breaking coverage never mentioned it: ABC News, USA Today, The Hill, the New York Post and Fox Weather. When questioned, many of these outlets pointed the study’s authors to other climate coverage they had done, but this study’s focus on breaking news stories was deliberate:
Our analysis focused only on breaking stories because climate change is not a follow-up story; it is the story of the lethal and economically devastating extreme weather playing out across the country. To not mention climate change in a breaking news story about record heat in June 2024 is like not mentioning Covid-19 in a breaking news article about record hospitalizations in March 2020. It’s an abdication of journalistic responsibility to inform.
Explaining isn’t hard
A crucial takeaway for journalists and editors in this piece is that explaining the cause of these weather events isn’t hard. It’s often a matter of adding a sentence at most, Atkin and Samuelson write. They provide examples of stories that successfully made this connection, as with BBC (6/24/24):
Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of human-caused climate change, fueled by activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.
Heatwaves are becoming more severe and prolonged due to the global climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
Notably, the Guardian piece was a reprint of an AParticle that did not originally include that sentence; Heated confirmed that it was added by a Guardian editor.
AP, however, was sometimes able to provide appropriate context, as in a June 21 piece:
This month’s sizzling daytime temperatures were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees F hotter (1.4 degrees C) because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas—in other words, human-caused climate change.
More denial than acknowledgment
During last summer’s apocalyptic orange haze on the East Coast, caused by record Canadian wildfires, I conducted a similar study (FAIR.org, 7/18/23) on US TV news’s coverage. Out of 115 segments, only 38% mentioned climate change’s role. Of those 115, 10 mentioned it in passing, 10 engaged in climate denial and 12 gave a brief explanation without alluding to the reality that climate change is human-caused. Only five segments acknowledged that climate change was human caused, and just seven fully fleshed out the fact that the main cause of the climate crisis is fossil fuels.
When there are more segments denying climate change than acknowledging fossil fuels’ role in it, you know there’s a problem.
This year, I noticed coverage of worldwide coral bleaching that did make the appropriate connections (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). As Atkin and Samuelson emphasized, the difference between careless and responsible reporting on this issue is often just a few words.
Set firmly within the BBC’s public service broadcasting ethos of informing, educating and entertaining, Doctor Who quickly became a mainstay of Saturday-evening viewing. By 1965, it was drawing in around 10 million viewers.
Throughout its history, Doctor Who has tapped into political, social and moral issues of the day – sometimes explicitly, other times more subtly. During the 1970s, when the Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, there were a number of examples of this.
Doctor Who in the 1970s
The 1970s were a period of political and social divisions: relationships between the government the unions in the first part of the decade was strained, exemplified by the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. The political consensus that had dominated since 1945 was under pressure with talk of a break-up of the UK in the form of Welsh and Scottish Assemblies.
In his cultural history of Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis, television historian James Chapman argued that the 1970s painted “an uncomfortably sinister projection of the sort of society that Britain might come”.
It was never clear if Doctor Who storylines during this time were set in the present or at some point in the future. The fact that one of the lead characters, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of the United Nations Intelligence Task Force (UNIT), calls the prime minister “Madam” in a telephone conversation in one episode suggests the latter.
The opening credits for Doctor Who in the 1970s, with Jon Pertwee as Doctor.
As for some of the more politically engaged stories, The Green Death (1973), or “the one with the giant maggots” as it is known by fans, certainly pulled no punches. Described by Chapman as an “eco disaster narrative”, it pitted corporate greed and capitalism against environmental activists (portrayed here as Welsh hippies) and their concerns for the planet.
In the episode, Global Chemicals, run by a faceless machine, is tipping waste from its petrochemical plant into a disused mine in the south Wales valleys (cue awful Welsh stereotypes). The green sludge not only kills people, but creates mutant maggots which also attack. As fears grew and the green movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, this story would have resonated with large parts of the audience.
When the Doctor visits the planet Peladon in The Curse of Peladon (1972), the planet is attempting to join the Galactic Federation. There are those on the planet who argue for joining, while opponents are just as vociferous, arguing that joining the Federation would destroy the old ways of the planet.
Sound familiar? This is the time that Britain was negotiating to join the European Economic Community, as it did in 1973. Interestingly, the serial was broadcast during the time of the 1972 miners’ strike (leading to many viewers missing later episodes due to power cuts).
The follow-up story, The Monster of Peladon (1974), is set against a backdrop of industrial strife and conflict involving miners.
Tom Baker’s Doctor
In what many consider to be one of the best classic serials, Genesis of the Daleks (1975) Tom Baker’s doctor continued the tradition of raising complex political, social and moral issues.
Jon Pertwee’s Doctor regenerates to become Tom Baker’s.
Sent back in time by the Time Lords to change the course of history, the Doctor at one point has an opportunity to destroy the mutations which form the “body” of the Dalek (inside their metal casing) and destroy the Dalek race forever. Holding two wires close to each other, about to create an explosion in the incubation room, he asks himself and his companions: “Have I that right?”
Having the ability to see the future, he says that future planets will become allies in fighting the evil of the Daleks. Had he the right to change the course of history? Given the symbolism used in the story (salutes, black outfits, references to a “pure” race) this was a clear reference to the rise of the Nazis.
The political allegories didn’t end in the 1970s. One of the most blatant can be seen in the 1988 serial, The Happiness Patrol. The main antagonist, Helen A (played by Sheila Hancock), a ruthless and tyrannical leader is said to be modelled on Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The fact that Hancock appears to be impersonating Thatcher lends a certain degree of credence to this belief.
Anybody who argues that the revival of Doctor Who in 2005 saw a more political edge to the storylines need only look back over 60 years. Now that we can do this thanks to the BBC uploading more than 800 episodes onto iPlayer, it will become clear to all.
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