Date published: 2008/02/27
The BBC says:
Energy Saving Day, a 24-hour initiative aiming to reduce the UK's electricity use, begins on Wednesday evening.
A coalition of environmental groups, religious leaders and energy companies is asking people to curb climate change by turning off devices not in use.
The National Grid will monitor how much difference it makes to consumption, while power companies will identify customers wanting home insulation.
The BBC News website will be displaying results in close to real time.
...
E-Day started life as a Planet Relief, which was to have been an awareness-raising BBC TV programme with a large element of comedy.But in September the BBC decided to pull the project, saying viewers preferred factual or documentary programmes about climate change.
The decision came after poor audiences for Live Earth, and public debate over whether it was the corporation's role to "save the planet".
This hardly got any publicity, until today, so most people are no doubt unaware of the event. And after five hours (so still nineteen hours to go), the actual consumption is slightly higher than the "business as usual" prediction of consumption. But the BBC does not give error bars on the prediction, so presumably we could well be in a statistical dead heat.
And the problem with the BBC's coverage of these events is not so much that the corporation should not be "saving the planet", but that the events are totally biased towards one viewpoint, specifically the academic middle class viewpoint that indeed always dominates the BBC's coverage of the world. So in this context, cars are bad, trains are good, Tesco is bad, farmers' markets are good, suburbs are bad, big cities are good, etc. Needless to say, most of the UK disagrees, but from the coverage on the BBC (and in many of the national newspapers) you would think otherwise.
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