Daily Jekyll and Mail Hyde

Well it seems that I’m not the only person with a bit of an obsession about the accuracy of the Daily Mauls ‘scientific’ articles and their Jekyll and Hyde nature. In an interesting piece recently in the Guardian, Bob Ward comments on this too, in the context of the Press Complaints Commission’s ability to self regulate.

The reason that the Daily Fail almost gets the science right on occasion is that it has an ‘admirable science editor, Michael Hanlon’, who would have guessed?

'We also have the newspapers owners boast that the company has reduced its emissions of carbon dioxide by more than 13% since 2007, well ahead of its target of a 10% cut by 2012'.

Both these things don’t seem to sit well with the Mauls editor, Paul Darce, who is allegedly in cahoots with Lord Lawson and BennyPeiser and their skeptic organisation the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This would account for why science coverage so often and so spectacularly fails

This explains the flip flopping nature of science stories in the paper and the point of Bob Ward’s article is that the blatant misinterpretation of the facts and the promotion of misinformation shows a clear disregard for the Press Complainants Commission’s rules; Rules that are supposed to be upheld by a newspapers editor in this self regulatory system.

But for me, the most interesting thing in the article is the example that Bob Ward uses when he claims that;

"The main aim of the Daily Mail campaign has been to convince readers that the rising cost of living is mainly due to policies to reduce UK emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

My MEP, Roger Helmer, must be a Daily Fail reader or at least signed up to similar agenda by suggesting energy price increases are mainly down to green taxes, used to subsidise the likes of wind generation, as I showed in a previous post.

So how much of energy price rises or just energy costs to the consumer are due to these so called green taxes? I have asked Helmer on his blog while trying to get him to justify himself. Some more research is needed and will be the subject of another post soon.