Readers will be astonished to learn that Ofcom believes there is no duty to do so saying:

“The requirement for due impartiality in news is important but this does not automatically mean that equal representation of views will be required in every report. There is scope under the Code to take a number of factors into consideration, including the nature of the story; the level of broad consensus; the degree to which it relates directly to the UK; and the appropriate judgement of a journalist on the ground ”

So basicaly they enforce the “broad consensus” of government claims (it is quite obvious checking online that therer is no non-governmental consensus).
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/08/ofcom-ignore-thier-own-rules-to-promote.html

Here’s a possibility where “4 million” comes

http://www.childproofing.org/news/archives/2006/06/june_16_-_one-q.htm

Sloppy, but at least there’s a source for the mistake. I can’t remember any video deception being bigger than Al Gore’s escalating ladder/hockey stick graph stunt, though.

My question to anyone who’s seen both AIT or TGGWS, which is the most exagerated in the conclusions, and which has the most factual errors? How many clear errors are there (not differences of opinion, but total misrepresentation of the facts) in both? Or in other words, are there any out and out lies?

For example, TGGWS says this:

Anne Mougella is about to cook a meal for her children. She is one of the two billion people – a third of the world’s population – who have no access to electricity. Instead they must burn wood or dried animal dung in their homes. The indoor smoke this creates is the deadliest form of pollution in the world. According to the World Health Organisation, 4 million children under the age of five die each year from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke; and many millions of women die early from cancer and lung disease, for the same reason.

The WHO in June 2005 said:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed the contribution of a range of risk factors to the burden of disease and revealed indoor air pollution as the 8th most important risk factor and responsible for 2.7% of the global burden of disease . Globally, indoor air pollution from solid fuel use is responsible for 1.6 million deaths due to pneumonia, chronic respiratory disease and lung cancer, with the overall disease burden (in Disability-Adjusted Life Years or DALYs, a measure combining years of life lost due to disability and death) exceeding the burden from outdoor air pollution five fold. In high-mortality developing countries, indoor smoke is responsible for an estimated 3.7% of the overall disease burden, making it the most lethal killer after malnutrition, unsafe sex and lack of safe water and sanitation.

So is this a lie, a distortion, an exageration, or simply that TGGWS got the figure from elsewhere, either a news story that had a different WHO source, a different source misatributed to the WHO, or the reporter made up? Certainly it’s not totally correct, the number is inflated from WHO, so is this just hype to make things seem more dire a la AIT with a number made up by TGGWS? What would it be called?

Question: Does paying a ghostwriter to hack up a book on the putative Assault on Reason when you yourself regularly indulge in the practice make you a hypocrite-squared or a hypocrite once-removed?

Yawn. Guess I’ll leave that one to the logicians.

Why does that name sound eerily familiar? Ah – brain coughs up another trivioid: The late, lamented Truth or Truthiness; sorry, can’t recall the lady’s name, but she was helplessly glued to this tar-baby for several weeks.