BBC Admits Their Claim About Pakistan Floods Was False
There’s been an interesting follow-up to this story about the Pakistan floods at the end of August (h/t Tim):
Readers will recall that the claim that one-third of the country was under water immediately set off my BS detector, and I did a full analysis here, totally debunking it.
But just a couple of days after my piece, the BBC’s More or Less radio program also looked at the claim after some viewers had complained:
They interviewed an environmental scientist who checked out what the various satellite records indicated. His conclusion was that the true figure was that about 10% of the country had been affected by floods, and much of this was short-term. [emphasis, links added]
In fact, all the BBC had to do was what I did in a few minutes, and check what NASA was reporting:
It was plainly evident that nothing like a third of the country had flooded. Indeed a simple look at the map would have shown them that much of Pakistan is either mountainous or desert, which would be impossible to flood.
They could also have checked with the UN disaster agency, OCHA, who were publishing regular reports on the flooding.
According to them, the area affected was 75000 sq km or 9% of the country:
In fact, these are precisely the sort of checks the BBC should have carried out before making their absurd claim. One which anybody with an ounce of common sense, or integrity would have immediately suspected was wrong.
It is doubly ironic that the BBC’s defense was that the one-third claim had been widely reported across the media. This shows just how utterly corrupt most of the media is nowadays.
h/t Rúnar O.
Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That
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