BBC staffers were recently taught how best to push messages about climate doom. So much for impartiality. Licence payers never agreed to this condescending nonsense.
– – –
Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda, says The Spectator (via Climate Change Dispatch).
A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world.
The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories on its homepage today to climate change.
So just as well then those BBC staffers were recently treated to an internal audience research briefing telling them how best to convey messages about climate change to different audiences.
The briefing – which one insider described as being more reminiscent of ‘a campaigning organization’ – identifies seven different groups of viewers and how to appeal to them: ‘progressive activists,’ ‘civic pragmatists,’ ‘established liberals,’ ‘loyal nationals,’ ‘disengaged battlers,’ ‘backbone conservatives,’ and ‘disengaged traditionalists.’
Explaining how ‘we need to talk to them in different ways’, the briefing ranks these groups on an axis of security, health, and wealth on a diversity scale based on ‘closeness’ to your neighbor.
How such metrics are assessed is not revealed in the presentation.
For ‘loyal nationals’ who are working class and authoritarian ‘boomers’ who feel patriotic but ‘threatened’, the guidance orders staff to ‘build on climate concern without feeding fears of climate migration.’
This group is the only one listed as voting for Brexit.
Meanwhile, journalists are instructed to ‘build trust’ with ‘disengaged battlers’ by showing how ‘the benefits’ of climate action will help ‘people like them.’
For this ‘fatalistic, isolated, urban group’ a ‘middle-class environmentalist lifestyle’ is judged to be an ineffective way of engagement.
Both the ‘disengaged traditionalists’ and ‘backbone conservatives’ are listed in the research alongside the euphemistic label ‘British pride.’
The former group can apparently be won over by changing the messenger and a focus on ‘national pride in practical achievements’, while the latter – skeptical, male, and working-class – are allegedly susceptible to messages which talk about ‘manufacturing fit for purpose.’
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
August 10, 2021