Setting the record straight: What Channel 4 got wrong

Last week Channel 4 set out to discredit and undermine the environmental movement with their documentary, ‘What the Green movement got wrong’, featuring a handful of individuals that most people have never heard of blaming environmentalists for everything from mass starvation to the spread of malaria to fuel poverty.

Last week Channel 4 set out to discredit and undermine the environmental movement with their documentary, ‘What the Green movement got wrong’.

Featuring a handful of individuals that most people have never heard of blaming environmentalists for everything from mass starvation to the spread of malaria to fuel poverty, the programme prompted The Guardian’s TV critic John Crace to mock:

“Stand by for further Channel 4 documentaries: How the Greens Caused the Banking Crisis, and Why the Greens Invaded Iraq.”

However, jokes aside, there were a number of false accusations and hidden interests put forward in the film so here Left Foot Forward highlights and rebuts some of them.

First, as George Monbiot highlighted in his column, contrary to the misleading impression given in C4’s polemic, a ban on the use of the pesticide DDT to combat malaria was never encouraged by Greenpeace. Indeed nor were DDT anti-malarial programmes ever banned. Ironically, Greenpeace actually support the use of DDT when used for malaria control.

Second, one of the principle contributors to the film, Adam Werbach, is now considering an OFCOM complaint against C4 for misrepresenting his views.

Werbach told the Guardian that the film:

“… misrepresents who is to blame for many of our social and environmental problems. Blaming environmentalists for starvation and lack of energy [in developing nations] is like blaming weathermen for the weather.”

On Friday Werbach responded to the broadcast in The Atlantic, writing:

“It’s not helpful… when environmentalists are portrayed as all-powerful zealots that have wreaked havoc on the planet.”

He also explained how his protests led to some last-minute editorial changes. Left Foot Forward has learned that Channel 4 were also forced, at the last minute, to remove from their film, statistics about climate change opinions because MORI said they were misleading.

Third, the narrator of C4’s film said all the critics of the green movement that they feature in their film are all united by their belief that climate change is a huge threat that is being driven by human activity. But in fact, one of their central commentators, Patrick Moore, is a climate change sceptic who featured in C4’s own ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’. As Left Foot Forward explained on Thursday, he is also a paid shill for the logging and nuclear industries.

Fourth, the programme suggested people starved in Zambia during a famine when the Zambia government rejected food aid because it was Genetically Modified, and that this was because of environmentalists. In fact, Greenpeace wrote to the Zambian government advising they should not reject GM food aid if no non-GM food aid was available.

Greenpeace have published a detailed response to this serious accusation here. Given C4’s flawed account of the argument over GM food, perhaps it is hardly surprising that it has emerged that the main critics they interviewed for their programme on this issue are funded by biotech corporations including Monsanto. One of them, Florence Wambugu, is a lobbyist for a number of biotech companies.

Finally, Stewart Brand – whose book was the inspiration behind the programme – set up the Global Business Network, which boasts 12 major energy companies among its membership which have interests in both nuclear and coal electricity industries.

If you’re interested, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and a number of other environmentalists have also written their own detailed responses and rebuttals to Channel 4.

26 Responses to “Setting the record straight: What Channel 4 got wrong”

  1. Anon E Mouse

    Joss Garman – Obviously I can read – especially web pages put up to disagree with a statement against an opinion.

    The end of your link states: “To say that African countries adopted policies on advice from Greenpeace and other environment groups is wrong. African governments decide these things for themselves”

    Perhaps, in the interests of transparency, you’d care to publish a link to the original opinion they gave to the Zambian government instead of their opinion of what they said they said.

    Then everyone will be able to decide if they actually DID give the opinion that they state.

    Because so far we only have your/their word for it and if that OPINION is considered to be EVIDENCE then so should the OPINION’s of the commentators in the C4 program in which case it is a cyclic waste of time.

    I bet no one produces the original correspondence in this matter.

    What is a fact is the people starved to death because of someone’s advice to that government – if it wasn’t Greenpeace’s advice that contributed to their opinion then please show us. Prove it.

    If not it’s just your word against theirs…

  2. Joss Garman

    @ Anon E Mouse: Well, so now we know you didn’t actually watch the programme because at 52 mins in they do indeed actually show the letter Greenpeace sent to the Zambians. (They had to include it at the last minute as otherwise they would have been vulnerable to libel action for making false statements.)

  3. Anon E Mouse

    Joss Garman – No I didn’t see that letter in but I’ll see if it’s on YouTube and be back. If it is then obviously I’ll apologise…

  4. Mr. Sensible

    Cheers Joss.

  5. Anon E Mouse

    Joss Garman – I have seen the letter and it’s worse than I thought.

    In this public forum can you please explain where the information in the final paragraph comes from:

    “The safety of GM food is unproven. On the contrary, there is sufficient scientific evidence to suggest it is unsafe. GM food can potentially give rise to a range of health problems, including: food allergies, chronic toxic effects, infections from bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics, rendering those infections untreatable; and possible ailments including cancers, some of which are yet difficult or impossible to predict because of the present state of risk assessment and food safety tests”

    There was certainly NO EVIDENCE for any of those claims even today yet that was a decade ago and the end of your link where Greenpeace state:

    “To say that African countries adopted policies on advice from Greenpeace and other environment groups is wrong. African governments decide these things for themselves”

    Well if the African government didn’t know any better about how safe GM is and at the time they didn’t, what were they to do?

    Without ANY evidence that GM foods were harmful Greenpeace added it’s name to a letter that advised an ignorant government that it was a political American idea to potentially kill their people with dangerous foods.

    And with the connivance of Friends Of The Earth (but not the innocents who live on it) the people continued to starve to death.

    Well done Joss – I bet you had your organic muesli this morning. Ten years ago those wretched people in Zambia didn’t…

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