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22 Jul, 7 tweets, 2 min read
Imagine an oil executive making self-serving and misleading claims about renewable energy in Radio Times.
Then imagine BBC TV giving him a primetime platform every week to promote his own industry.
msn.com/en-gb/foodandd…
This is where we are with @BBCCountryfile, which makes no attempt to balance its coverage of livestock farming, one of the world’s most damaging industries.
Balance?
Impartiality?
Every week it drives a coach and horses through the BBC’s editorial guidelines.
Is there any other kind of BBC programme making in which industrial lobbyists are given primetime slots, week in, week out, to promote their industry, without any challenge or attempt at balance?
Is there any other kind of programme making in which the brutal realities of an industry are entirely obscured by bucolic myths and twee fabrications?
For example, they never show how these farmers make their living.
It's not from keeping animals, which, in economic terms, are entirely ornamental.
It's from filling out subsidy forms.
ahdb.org.uk/news/farm-busi… Image
Livestock graziers in the UK are entirely dependent on the taxpayer.
Why don't they ever tell us this?
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
The BBC's persistent lies about the livestock industry have real-world consequences. They insulate it from challenge, contribute to public ignorance, help sustain one of the greatest threats to the living world.
That is not a public service.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
24 Jul
Why is this legal? It sounds like the work of a trammel netter, knocking out the long-lived species crucial to marine foodwebs. The fishing industry's mass destruction of our beautiful ecosystems has to stop.
walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-new…
The ratio of destruction to production of some of these fishing operations is off the scale. It's possible that the person who killed all those sharks didn't even fill a fish box with their target species, or take home any fish at all.
Our governments allow the fishing industry to treat our seas as a free-for-all. The result is cascading ecological collapse, as ancient biological structures on the seabed and big, slow-growing species are destroyed en masse. It's heartbreaking.
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
19 Jul
Any reasonable conception of freedom holds that we should be free to do as we wish, up to, but not beyond, the point at which we cause harm to other people.
In other words, it does not include the freedom to spread a deadly virus.
Over the years, great efforts have been made to promote a different conception of freedom: "I can do what the hell I like, regardless of the impact on anyone else".
They call it libertarianism. I call it being a selfish arse.
Of course, in this conception, "I" does not mean "you". Those who scream about their own, absolute, freedoms tend to be the first to deny freedoms to others, be they asylum seekers, protesters, Gypsies etc, as you can see in the current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
17 Jul
For 20 years, the billionaire press told us "we can easily adapt to a warmer world".
Try telling that to people in Germany, Belgium and the western seaboard of North America.
And this is just one degree of heating.

The media did this, as surely as the fossil fuel companies.
Let's not forget those who told us there was little to worry about. People with massive media platforms, who helped push us towards catastrophe.
Matt Ridley
Bjorn Lomborg
Nigel Lawson
Christopher Booker
David Rose
Peter Hitchens ....
The roll of dishonour is long and grim
And, of course, their editors and proprietors.
And the so-called thinktanks shilling for the fossil fuel companies.
Doubtless they all believed they were being ever so clever. But if we recall their names at all, we'll remember them as traitors to humanity.
Read 10 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
16 Jul
So here are the key takeaways from #Rivercide.
1. We're rightly disgusted by the privatised water companies, cutting their costs by dumping raw sewage into our rivers.
But revolting and extreme as this is, it’s NOT the primary cause of river pollution in the UK.
Thread/
2. So what is? The answer will surprise many people.
Farming.
There are several reasons: soil erosion, fertilisers, pesticides etc.
But the most extreme cause is this: industrial livestock units.
The problem is simply stated: they produce too much dung for the land to absorb.
3. They gather nutrients from a large area and release them into a small one. Modern chicken farms, for example, channel soya from vast areas of Brazil and Argentina into huge numbers of birds in industrial units. The nutrients in their dung are spread on the surrounding land.
Read 18 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
15 Jul
All my working life, I’ve wanted to fight the forces trashing the living world. I’ve wanted to fight them in the most powerful medium, television. Instead, I’ve found myself fighting TV executives, who for 36 years have nixed almost every proposal I’ve made.
Doubtless unwittingly, they stand guard in front of the corporations and governments destroying our life support systems, ensuring that journalists can very seldom make the hard-hitting exposes required to hold them to account.
They appear to be terrified of the kind of kinetic, campaigning, investigative journalism I want to do. And their fear seems to make them furious. The treatments I’ve written seem to press a button, which makes them shout and swear and dismiss them out of hand.
Read 8 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
9 Jul
Every government seeks to remake the nation in its own image.

And what a cruel, reckless, dysfunctional nation they're turning this into.

Thread/
Their vision appears to be of a nation where no one does anything for the sake of any one else.
In which self-interest rules.
In which we become people

“… who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.”
In which we have boundless compassion for pets, but none whatsoever for asylum seekers.
In which, if you are poor, sick, disabled or homeless, you are treated as a nameless embarrassment, invited to shuffle off quietly and die.
Read 12 tweets

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