BONG! “Here is the news. As Cuadrilla announces two more exploratory drilling sites for shale gas in Lancashire, Chancellor George Osborne claims victory in the battle for hearts and minds over fracking, saying a broad consensus is in favour.”

Bong! “Meanwhile, in other news, the Government’s own DECC Tracker of Public Attitudes published this week revealed a further slide in public support for shale gas exploration, down to 27 per cent. It also showed a large increase in support for renewable energy, which had surged to 77 per cent. An even larger sample of people surveyed by Nottingham University also showed that only a quarter were now in favour of fracking.”

I don’t recall seeing the second ‘bong’ on the TV news, although the facts are correct. I don’t know why I bother to switch on the news at all these days. I guess it’s because I still think that (a) I will hear some proper, real news – as opposed to regurgitated government propaganda – and (b) I will be informed by what the Minister for Farting About has to say, which actually only ever makes me so mad that I end up yelling at the TV with a passion that Jeremy Kyle brings out in others.

Having said that I have, courtesy of social media, come across two recent news items – a bulletin on Channel 4 and an Inside Out documentary by BBC Yorkshire and Lincolnshire – that have made telling contributions to the debate on fracking.

The former, on January 26, was a clip of an interview with anti-fracking campaigner Vanessa Vine and the Conservative MP Peter Lilley, who sits on the Government’s Energy Committee and is also on the board of Tethys Petroleum.

Vine accused Lilley of lying on live TV, tore into him over the health concerns, seismic impacts and air and water pollution caused by shale gas exploration and put him on the back foot over fracking in the UK.

Lilley, spluttering, could only make disparaging noises about “these people who want to keep all fossil fuels to remain in the ground” (tut-tut, Pete, there’s a reason for that; unlike your petroleum buddies we need to stop burning it or we’ll hit a 10C increase in warming and all life will disappear – this from the latest assessment from the IPCC, which came out two weeks ago and oddly enough didn’t get reported much either).

Lilley didn’t even bother to defend the Cameron-Osborne lie of cheaper energy bills – one of the much-touted reasons for the dash for gas – suggesting that the tax revenues from shale gas were the big attraction and that this was what his 70,000 constituents really wanted.

I reckon he should poll them again – he might be in for a surprise. My guess is that they’d prefer safe drinking water, healthy kids, unspoilt countryside and to keep their property prices, even the Tories. Especially the Tories. Have you seen the house prices in Hitchin and Harpenden?

Lilley’s mantra-like repeating that the Royal Society of Science and the Royal Academy of Engineering had given their blessing to fracking, stating that any problems of environment safety and health could be satisfactorily managed in this country, also turns out to be suspect when you listened to oil industry expert Tony Hill on the Inside Out documentary of January 20.

Hill said emphatically that they can’t, calling the Environment Agency ‘totally clueless’ and saying it lacked the equipment and the expertise to do effective monitoring (which, if you check the Royal Society’s report, is central to its ‘support’ for the process: “Robust monitoring is vital before, during and after shale gas operations”).

Hundreds of licences for shale gas drilling have been granted across Yorkshire and Lincs (three in or close to York, by the way). Hill, who worked on the drilling rig in Blackpool that caused the earthquake, wants fracking to go ahead, but only if it’s regulated and monitored. He says the current situation is “weird and absurd – it’s dangerous to the public in Yorkshire and across the UK because if we get fracking by stealth we don’t get any regulation either”.

If you want to decide for yourself, a public meeting has been organised by Frack-Free York: Our Clean Energy Future on Monday, February 17, at 7pm at the Priory St Centre, York, at which representatives of Dart Energy, which holds the licence blocks for York, will speak.

• Follow Kate Lock on Twitter @KlockworksKate