I lodged a complaint with the BBC on Roger Harrabin, their environment analyst, and his coverage of the proposal to mine coal in Cumbria. There is a good article by Paul Homewood at NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (Harrabin Complaint Resubmitted | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (wordpress.com) where he covers the first 5 Harrabin articles. Paul shows succinctly the total one-sidedness of Harrabins attitude to coal mining.

In addition, I submitted a complaint based on the lines of the background information to this petition. Although my complaint was rejected on the grounds that they had received a number of complaints and had decided to pick one aspect of them to "hang a peg on." Needless nowhere in the rebuttal was any room found to deal with the substance i.e. the biased nature of the reporting.

I have submitted an appeal that draws attention to a statement by the new Director-General of the BBC that states: "people that cannot leave their politics at their door have no place in the BBC." Given the prema facie case of immense bias shown in Harrabins articles, I would expect his horns to be severely clipped at the very least. It does however appear that we have had some success as shown in the latest article published on the 9th Feb (Whitehaven coal mine plan to be re-examined by council - BBC News) covering a further Cumbria County Council meeting, which is far more balanced. The new meeting takes place on the 19th Feb and the hope is that this meeting is to cover themselves in the event of a Greenpeace judicial challenge.