Newsnight hit a new low on Thursday night, failing to challenge the claims of two climate protestors. Ross Clark in the Spectator has more.
Newsnight’s presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded [held] a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion.
There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot?
There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too – given that it has offered to ‘police’ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business?
None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that “violence’”was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint.
Rumbelow was then introduced. She asserted that “we need to move into civil resistance against our criminal government which is pushing for new oil and gas”. Derbyshire failed to challenge this remark and ask the obvious: what criminal law is the government supposed to have broken?
Read more: Newsnight Stoops to New Low in Coverage of London Marathon Protest
