BBC to Review Bias in Climate Change Coverage

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Richard Eldred

The BBC has launched an internal investigation into the woeful shortcomings of its climate coverage. Did the Director-General read Paul Homewood’s article documenting 50 instances when the BBC has published or broadcast climate misinformation? The Telegraph has more.

The broadcaster has decided to review its climate and energy policy reporting after a string of controversies. It has been forced to make a series of corrections, with some programmes being removed altogether.

It comes with the BBC at the centre of a bias row after the Telegraph published a leaked letter, which had been sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser.

He wrote of his “despair at inaction” by executives over widespread evidence of skewed reporting. …

Now the broadcaster will face fresh scrutiny on its climate coverage, with its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee deciding to carry out a “thematic review” of its coverage of “energy policy in the UK and climate change”.

This would make it the latest in a series of reviews on impartiality carried out by the BBC in recent years.

They are part of its 10-point impartiality plan which was introduced in 2021, following an inquiry into the scandal surrounding the 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, involving Martin Bashir. …

Earlier this year, the BBC quietly edited an episode of Question Time after allegedly making a false claim about Net Zero. The corporation has defended the move, saying it is “normal practice to edit the programme before broadcast for audience clarity”.

Last year, a complaint was upheld when a BBC News article presented as fact the claim that “human-induced climate change made recent extreme heat in the US South-West, Mexico and Central America around 35 times more likely”.

In May 2022, Justin Rowlatt, the BBC’s Climate Editor, was found to have made misleading claims about extreme weather in a Panorama documentary.

In October 2020, Ofcom upheld a complaint by the National Farmers’ Union about the documentary Meat: A Threat to our Planet? and the documentary was later removed from BBC iPlayer.

Worth reading in full.

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ResourceGuy
November 10, 2025 11:07 am

Maybe DJT can threaten them again with a bias suit like the one just now causing BBC resignations. Surely the US can compile the costs of willful BBC bias in climate policy effects.

ResourceGuy
November 10, 2025 11:08 am

I want reparations payments from BBC climate bias in reference to the Paris Climate Agreement. They played their part.

Bob
November 10, 2025 11:44 am

More good news, lets hope it amounts to something.

November 10, 2025 11:56 am

Years ago when the BBC set up a committee to determine wether “both” sides of the climate change discussion should get equal attention, one of the members was the head of comedy.

I kid you not. Seems quite clear from the onset what the committee was going to decide

Ray Sanders
Reply to  huls
November 10, 2025 12:41 pm
November 10, 2025 11:56 am

On BBC4 they were discussing which tax hikes the new Starmer budget should consider. Mind you, NOT spending cuts ( which ARE also going to happen).
The experts put forward income tax and VAT, both unpopular.
Not a word about spending cuts w an omerta on anything in relation to The Climate/ Net Zero and the Ukraine conflict/ re-armament. That is considered Special Status. A cordon sanitaire around it. That of which one must not speak.

Edward Katz
November 10, 2025 2:12 pm

Since the BBC, Canada’s CBC and number of other media outlets are heavily dependent on government-i.e., taxpayer-funding, they should be closely scrutinized to see how balanced their climate/environmental coverage really is. The CBC is one outfit that can hardly wait for some weather event as an excuse to activate its climate crisis narrative. But when it comes to listing the benefits that fossil fuels have provided during the past century, there’s not a chance anyone will hear from it.

November 10, 2025 3:58 pm

So… they will investigate themselves and find that they have done nothing wrong I would presume?

The BBC, and the ABC in Australia, need to be liquidated and sold off. They are both utterly corrupted to the core.

November 10, 2025 4:46 pm

Its not just climate. If it were it would be in a much better place. The BBC thinks its role is political activism exercised through its broadcasts. Its enemies are the ‘far-right’ everywhere. Trump, the UK Conservative Party, Le Pen in France etc. Its ideology is a weird mix of Islamism, anti-Semitism, Extinction Rebellion, Corbynism, Black Lives Matter, Trans Ideology. Leavened with aiming internally at the right kind of diversity. And on climate, just making stuff up, numbers, weather attributions, anything for the cause.

You could see it clearly enough in their coverage of the scandal. Nick Robinson blaming far-right conspirators hostile to the BBC. Not the faking of the Trump speech broadcasts. Not the idiocy of pretending male sex criminals are really women. Not ascribing the damage from misfiring Hamas rockets to the IDF. Not refusing to call Hamas terrorists, which they legally are in Britain under the law. No, its conspiring Conservatives on the BBC Board who are to blame for all this. And Trump, of course.

There is no turning this thing around. They think they are God’s gift to Britain and deserve to be funded by the taxpayers they dislike and despise indefinitely and generously. The only solution is close it in its present form. Split it up and let the parts fund themselves. And since this will not happen, the outcome is more and more people stopping paying the ‘license fee’.

A misnomer. What it is, its a tax on watching live TV, the proceeds handed to the BBC. Its like a tax on reading newspapers, proceeds to the local Pravda. Or a tax on using supermarkets, proceeds to the state stores. Or making people have a license to read books, proceeds to the state publisher. And all this for an organization that has completely gone off the rails and doesn’t have the slightest regard for the interests of the state and people who are funding it.

Jono1066
November 10, 2025 4:57 pm

And
Justin Rowlatt said today on the BBC radio 4
that the USA, India and China had pulled out of COP30 etc “Just as the CO2 curve was leveling out,
is that misleading to the general public ?
sure it is ! they will think that we are almost winning the race to stop CO2 going up !

is it an accurate statement ?
possibly is ! as the CO2 curve goes up and down every year, in fact it has 2 inflection points

Now that there is called biased reporting, (or was it an error of judgement ?)

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