At Last: BBC Told To Ensure Balance On Climate Change
The Daily Telegraph, 13 October 2010
by Neil Midgley
Climate change sceptics are likely to be given greater prominence in BBC documentaries and news bulletins following new editorial guidelines that call for impartiality in the corporation’s science coverage.
The BBC has been repeatedly accused of bias in its reporting of climate change issues.
Last year one of its reporters, Paul Hudson, was criticised for not reporting on some of the highly controversial “Climategate” leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, even though he had been in possession of them for some time.
Climate change sceptics have also accused the BBC of not properly reporting “Glaciergate”, when a study from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that glaciers would melt by 2035 was discredited.
But the BBC’s new editorial guidelines, published yesterday after an extensive consultation that considered over 1,600 submissions by members of the public, say expressly for the first time that scientific issues fall within the corporation’s obligation to be impartial.
“The BBC must be inclusive, consider the broad perspective, and ensure that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected,” said BBC trustee Alison Hastings.
“In addition the new guideline extends the definition of ‘controversial’ subjects beyond those of public policy and political or industrial controversy to include controversy within religion, science, finance, culture, ethics and other matters.”
However James Delingpole, a prominent climate change sceptic, yesterday said that he predicted little movement in the BBC’s environmental stories.
“It’s highly unlikely that they’ll be more balanced in their coverage,” he said.
“It’s a whole cultural thing at the BBC – that people who don’t believe are just ‘flat earthers’. Whenever they invite dissenters like me on to debates, they surround us with ‘warmists’. On Any Questions, for example, Jonathan Dimbleby does his best to be impartial, but this is a man with a wind turbine in his garden.”
In 2007, a BBC Trust report called Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century said: “Climate change is another subject where dissenters can be unpopular … The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.”
The BBC Trust is also currently conducting a separate review into impartiality in the corporation’s science coverage, led by Professor Steve Jones from University College London, which will report in the spring of next year.
Professor Jones has been asked to consider whether the BBC’s output “gives appropriate weight to scientific conclusions including different theories and due weight to the views expressed by those sceptical about the science and how it was conducted or evaluated.”
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Richard Black the doyen of unbiased reporting said:-
“Successive reports, notably by the Dutch government, have found nothing to challenge the basic picture of a warming world that the IPCC and many other scientific bodies have painted in recent times – whatever the findings may have been about the behaviour of some individual scientists.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/10/climate_body_seeks_new_wardrob.html#comments
The BBC love makeover programmes and it is only when they carry out a makeover with their environmental correspondants with scientifically qualified personnel will any change occur.
About time, but I will believe it only when I see it. The BBC is stuffed over full of left-wing cultists who are totally in denial about anything not of that left-wing belief system. They literally cannot compute any data that runs counter to their belief system.
I have been in the UK for a few days and listened to ‘Costing the Earth’ today. A more ludicrous party political broadcast for panic stricken catastrophism one has rarely heard. There is no such thing as balance. There is not even any rationality. Some air head lady explained that indigenous peoples (whoever they are) have a law which is made nature and the environment and not by man. This apparently was the law which excused the Kingsnorth vandals. The complete falsity that extreme weather events are (a) increasing (b) caused by CO2 increases was taken for granted. It was taken for granted that the Katrina disaster was due to emissions.
The oil giants were to blame for having funded denialism, it was just like the tobacco situation all over again.
There was not even the smallest gesture to any different point of view. This was pure propaganda. The UK population is paying for this stuff out of what is essentially a tax levy on the privilege of watching television.
You can probably download it, listen. And then write and object.
But no, there is no balance. There is basically carefully put together deliberate propaganda that has no basis whatever in fact.
Nobody anywhere has established that Hudson was in possession of more than the one, single email that mentioned him personally, and that was passed to him by “a friend”. Because Hudson was able to attest to the veracity of THIS email, he suggested that the content of the Climategate ZIP file may be genuine – all before the veracity of the email content was confirmed by UEA.
Many have made the presumption that, because he had been forwarded THAT email, he must have known of the Climategate ZIP and stayed quiet. This is a logical fallacy. It would be nice if this was acknowledged at some point. Preferably soon.
As for the BBC reporting climate science in a balanced way, there is nothing in the new mandate to force change. The same reporters are reporting the same drivel in the same alarmist ways. Until the BBC’s environmental journalists and spokespeople become suspicious of advocacy scientists and sceptical of their motivations – ideological or financial – and until the BBC recruits science journalists rather than environmentalist advocates and activists, nothing will ever change at the BBC.
Isn’t Prof. Jones an advocate of agw? Not sure. Still, I’ll believe in a change when it actually happens. This last week on Radio 4 has seen a stream of programmes almost automatically accepting the agw hypothesis.
Will this make BBC = “Fair and Balanced” news? Hmm, seems rather unlikely, but it could happen…
BTW, I don’t think any news outlet is really unbiased. Anthony’s pretty close, though.
I’m surprised they didn’t ask Professor PHIL Jones to consider whether the BBC’s output “gives appropriate weight to scientific conclusions including different theories and due weight to the views expressed by those sceptical about the science and how it was conducted or evaluated.”
It’s a start?
Government should NEVER be in the business of funding journalism. The temptation to control content in pursuit of a political agenda is too great. The recipients of their funding are too easily manipulated.
Here is the USA we need to defund PBS and NPR. Let them stand on their own, if they can. It seems to me that both of these entities are pretty far left of center because the only party that has ever seriousely proposed to withdraw their funding are the repulicans.
I don’t need the Beeb and other media outfits to be more balanced – I just want them to be clear and honest about their rhetorical position on a story so that readers who give a crap can determine when they are being spun. For starters, a prominent link to the editorial guidelines would be essential.
I long abandoned the naïve notion that journalists acted like Joe Friday and just gave us the facts. “Facts” are used explicitly by politicians to argue for a certain position. Media outfits do the very same thing with facts but cloak themselves in the intellectually dishonest claim of “impartiality”. By compelling media outfits to publish editorial guidelines we can better know the spin (again assuming one cares enough to ferret out the spin).
Expecting the BBC to be balanced on global warming is like a boxing commentator asking a deaf person to extol the wonders of Mozart, they just don’t have any shared terms of reference. They can’t tell when they’re being biased.
They need to spend some time talking to sceptics to hear our side of the story, not our side as told by climate crusaders.
Don’t buy the hype. The media is the propaganda arm of the government, and government wants draconian global warming legislation.
Think what you like but it ain’t going to happen. There’s too much invested in AGM and the BBC are part of the machinery.
Anyway the good news is (from the Guardian) that the BBC willl have a tiny ‘carbon footprint’ covering Cancun Cop16..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/oct/14/chilean-miners-bbc-cancun-climate-talks
Damian Carrington – Guardian
“Certainly the political momentum has gone out of the climate talks after the Copenhagen debacle, which saw 120 world leaders turning up to sign a treaty which had yet to be negotiated. But sending just one correspondent to Mexico seems very underweight for one of the world’s biggest newsgathering organisations. Shame on them.”
What a shame. all those beaches and nice hotels going to waste.
All the BBC has to do is call up the CBC and run some Rex Murphy pieces
October 14, 2010 at 10:16 am
…Michel…one BBC Radio 4 “Costing the earth” programme is called: “Can we save
the earth by staying in our pyjamas?” … Monty Python somebody…??
michel says October 14, 2010 at 10:16 am
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r4wn
The notion of AGW is so engrained in the BBC that less bias is simply impossible to achieve. The message about warming creeps into almost every subject on R4 and if there is a rare reporting of sceptical views it is laced with dire warming comments by the reporter. The organisation is incapable of rational thought on the subject.
Sure, they’ll make sure they balance the coverage, the same way the CBC used to balance coverage of American politics. They would interview a Democrat who hated GWB, and then to balance things, they would interview a Republican who hated GWB. See how fair you can be if you try?
Simply marking the items in a store known for exorbitant pricing as “reduced” won’t bring in spending customers, and neither will token attempts at painting BBC as environmentally unbiased. The public has to see tangible change.
So, the ball rests in BBC’s court. Will they actually make a move?
Watch my lips – “There will be NO discernible change”.
Too much at stake, dyed-in-the-wool advocacy, and a pension fund to think about. They’ll not give up that easily, even if they pretend to. The BBC requires at best privatisation, at worst disassembly. pretty soon, too.
Ooooo, a news media reporting impartially… what a novel idea !
Fine in theory. But the main Science bodies are still putting out rubbish statements.
OK BBC. Will you put your money where your mouth is? Will you host a debate between experts on both sides?
WUWT readers – can we all ask for this?
Haha
I sent an email on Monday to the British Bovine Excrement Corp alerting them of the Hal Wilson story and requesting they cover it in the interest of fairness.
Have they?
Not yet and I’m not staying up till they do.
Even if the BBC sacked Harribin, Black and Shukman, it could never be balanced when covering the AGW hypothesis; the organisation is entirely funded by the license fee, which every 5 years or so the UK government reviews. Hence, the BBC never diverges too far from the government line on any policy or issue, lest it offends the politicians in charge, and it suffers a subsequent ‘cut’ in funding. As all the mainstream UK parties have fallen for the AGW bull, the BBC will be honour bound to support the AGW nonsense, for some time yet. That said, it is a big organisation, and there will always be some individuals who retain balance and integrity, but in recent years they have been few and far between. (Stephen Sackur’s excellent interview with Greenpeace’s outgoing Executive Director is the only piece that springs to mind – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC7bE9jopXE ). Hopefully this new guidance will mean that Paxman can start tearing in to the AGW advocates.