Articles Tagged "BBC Review"

It is now more than a year since the BBC Trust published a seminal report on the impartiality of the broadcaster's coverage of science, but there is clear evidence that it is still failing to address one of the main findings.

The author of the Trust's report, Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at University College London, warned about "false balance" in the BBC's reporting of issues, such as climate change, caused by "attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims an interest" in an issue.

In particular, Professor Jones questioned the application of the BBC's editorial guidelines, updated in October 2010, which require "due impartiality". His report stated:

"There is much debate within the BBC about impartiality as applied to science, with rather a split between its science specialists and its other elements. There may sometimes have been an over-rigid application of the guidelines to what is essentially a fact-based field. This can produce an adversarial attitude to science which allows minority, or even contrarian, views an undue place. The BBC has tried hard to find a suitable balance. I await with interest the results of the new Guidelines' emphasis on 'due weight' when making editorial judgements about impartiality. Whatever their influence there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence."

Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.

The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme.

Just as this scandal broke, I was also completing a report, to be published next month by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on the BBC’s coverage of climate change. It ranges from the puffing of scare stories dreamed up by “climate activists”, to BBC reporting on wind farms, often no more than shameless propaganda for the wind industry. Part of the story told in my report is the unhealthily close relationship that developed between the BBC and organisations professionally involved in the “warmist” cause.

The BBC, in determining its policy towards the coverage of global warming, which is of course not simply a scientific issue but an economic and a political issue, too, ought to shred that section of the Jones review and revert to the impartiality laid down in its charter.

In the second half of July, when most of us were preparing to set off on our summer holidays, the BBC Trust published a lengthy review of the impartiality and accuracy of the corporation’s coverage of science, most of which was taken up with what was described as an “independent assessment” by the geneticist Professor Steve Jones.

A substantial section of Jones’s assessment was, understandably, devoted to the important issue of global warming. Regrettably, that section was characterised chiefly by ignorance and intolerance. I was saddened not only by these general defects but also by an unwarranted attack on me personally. So, to be completely fair, I should quote the section in full.

Claiming that there is no longer any scope for serious debate over global warming, and that the media “face the danger of being trapped into a false balance, into giving equal coverage to the views of a determined but deluded minority and to those of a united but less insistent majority”, Jones complains:

“The impression of active debate is promoted by prominent individuals such as Lord Monckton and Lord Lawson. The BBC still gives space to them to make statements that are not supported by the facts: that (in a February 2011 The Daily Politics show) 95% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, while in fact human activity has been responsible for a 40% rise in concentration, or (a November 2009 Today programme) that volcanoes produce more gases than do humans (the balance is a hundred times in the opposite direction). For at least three years, the climate change deniers have been marginal to the scientific debate but somehow they continued to find a place on the airwaves.”

For a good Wednesday morning laugh, check out the Huffington Post article here. In the article, Kelly Rigg dances an end-zone jig about a supposedly “independent review” of BBC news coverage regarding global warming. The review, responding to complaints that BBC was biased in its coverage, concludes that BBC was not biased.

So, just how “independent” was the BBC review? BBC itself selected the reviewer, Steve Jones. For more on Jones's lack of objectivity, here is what I attempted to post in the “Comments” section after the Huffington Post article:

“It speaks volumes that Steve Jones is the Huffington Post’s most credible, non-partisan source. Jones recently wrote that when he found himself sitting next to Margaret Thatcher at a formal dinner, he had to search desperately for a conversation topic ‘that would not end up with one of us pouring a bowl of soup over the other.’ Hmmm… only people on the fringe lunatic left would have such a reaction when finding themselves sitting next to one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.

“And regarding global warming? Before taking on the task of evaluating BBC’s alarmist global warming coverage, Jones wrote:

Last week's independent review of the BBC's science coverage was a major setback for climate denialism, concluding as it did that the BBC has given far too much weight to unsubstantiated claims. But one point has been largely overlooked in the extensive news coverage and commentary about the report: climate denial activists had actively campaigned for the investigation in the first place. That campaign has clearly backfired.

The review was announced in early 2010 as a response to heated public debates on the coverage of controversial issues such as climate change, genetically engineered foods, and the MMR vaccine. In particular, the BBC's coverage of the 2009 email hacking scandal known as "climategate" sent denialists into fits of apoplexy, charging that the BBC had not given the story the prominence they believed it deserved.

Unlike other mainstream British media corporations, whose political leanings if not overt biases are well understood, the BBC is expected to be impartial. This is because it is funded through public licensing fees, and is governed by a Trust expressly mandated to "represent the public who own and pay for the BBC."

When the review was first announced, denialist bloggers applauded the victory: "Climategate has moved things along faster than we had hoped: Today, we learn the BBC's governing body, BBC Trust, has launched a major review of its science coverage after complaints of bias, most notably in its treatment of climate change."

Whether the staff of the BBC, facing budget cuts and the loss of 3,000 jobs, will consider last week’s BBC Trust Review of the corporation’s science coverage as money well spent is doubtful: according to a spokeswoman, it cost £140,000. Unfortunate as this is, the Review’s wider impact is rather more pernicious.

On a superficial reading, the Review, by the London University biologist Steve Jones, looks dull and bureaucratic. But beneath the surface it is an attempt to shut down debate and impose ideological conformity on a highly controversial issue – the extent and likely consequences of man-made global warming.

Why Professor Jones was thought a suitable person to conduct the Review at all is not a trivial question. Having long toiled in obscurity on the genetic makeup of snails, Jones owes his sudden metamorphosis into a ‘media tart’ (to use his own phrase) entirely to the BBC, which chose him to deliver the Reith Lectures in 1991.

Numerous further radio and TV appearances followed, and with them book sales of which he could not previously have dreamt.

It is also worth asking why the Trust decided to blow its money (a little under half of which went on Jones’s fee) on examining its science reporting: there are surely other areas of public policy significance – immigration, for example – where a casual viewer might conclude that BBC coverage can be self-censoringly selective.

In his report for the BBC Trust, Steve Jones actually attacks the BBC for having too little global-warming bias.

By any measure it has been one of the most momentous stories of our time. For nearly 20 years the belief that the earth was facing catastrophe from human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases seemed to carry all before it.

Nothing gave more credibility to this belief than the reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), relying on computer models programmed to show that, as CO2 levels rose, global temperatures would inevitably follow.

The IPCC used no more conspicuous piece of evidence to support its case than the famous “hockey stick” graph, purporting to show that by 1998 temperatures were soaring to by far their highest level in 1,000 years.

The politicians founds all this so convincing that there were high hopes they would sign a treaty in Copenhagen, in 2009, committing the world to massive cuts in emissions – thus presenting mankind with by far the biggest bill in history.

But from 2007 onwards this whole belief system began to go off the rails. The evidence of what was actually happening to temperatures showed that the IPCC’s computer models had got it seriously wrong.

More and more scientists around the world, many of them distinguished in their fields, challenged the theory, arguing that the factors influencing climate were far more complex, most notably changes in radiation from the sun and shifts in the world’s ocean currents.

Glad to see that the "banned" sceptics are still allowed to comment at the BBC, here are a few to this recent Richard Black report about the USA heat wave, no mention from Richard about the USA Temp history, just the normal "if its weather hot or cold it must be from man made co2". His point was that the public polls should swing back now it's Hot and that it was the cold winter that swung people away from MMCC, how wrong he is as you can see in the below comments.

1.beesaman
22nd July 2011 - 17:54
Could you please direct us to the published surveys of scientists that show the percentage of them that agree the the science behind AGW is settled? If you cannot, then can you stop saying it is?

Comment number 2.Peter317
22nd July 2011 - 18:07
By exactly what mechanism does a few tenths of a degree increase in the global average temperature cause a stalled high-pressure system, and therefore a heatwave?
Answers on the back of a £50 note, please.

Comment number 3.TVGgirl
22nd July 2011 - 18:10
beesaman http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107

Comment number 4.Cerebelum
22nd July 2011 - 18:16
No, no, no, no, no! On way out og middle ages mini-ice age. Bound to get warmer. Early 1700 to 1800 was possibly warmer than currently. Dendrochronology not safest science to rely on re: temperatures..more manure anyone?...Go dig out the facts about global temperature rises etc and their causes...ignore the hype by people that need the hype to get research grants.

Dr Steven Jones' amazing claim - but Auntie agrees.

"He's a little bit too eager to bend over backwards to be politically respectable," is how Richard Dawkins describes the celebrated snail biologist and broadcaster Dr Steven Jones.

Jones' recent political activity includes campaigning for the abolition of private schools and against a visit to Britain by the Pope. Now Jones has examined the BBC's science coverage – and concluded that there are too many climate sceptics appearing on the BBC.

Jones was commissioned and endorsed by the BBC's independent governing body, the BBC Trust. The Trust invited Jones to report on the impartiality and accuracy of the Beeb's science coverage. Jones found that 75 per cent of the BBC's science stories were based on a single press release, and seven out of eight of those only feature the source – there is no additional view to the story.

Jones also implies the correspondents are lazy: they rely on too few sources, too few experts, are overly dependent on reaction stories (to press releases) and focus too narrowly on too few subjects. Research conducted for Jones by the Science Communications Research Group at Imperial College found no significant factual errors in a monitoring period.

Before commenting on the BBC Trust’s report into the BBC’s science coverage, I thought I’d take the trouble of reading the actual document rather than the press previews. I’m very glad I waited because the finished product is an absolute corker. Let me take you through some of my favourite moments.

The report, as you may be aware, was written by my fellow Telegraph columnist Steve Jones. Besides being a fine and engaging writer, Dr Jones is a geneticist of distinction and I would certainly never dream of questioning his judgement in his fields of expertise (notably Drosophila and snails). Fortunately, as becomes quite clear reading the report, climate science isn’t one of them.

Dr Jones sets out his ideological position fairly early on when he strives to bracket global warming “denialism” with a range of other syndromes: believing that “AIDS has nothing to do with viruses, the MMR vaccine is unsafe, complex organs could never evolve, or even that the 9/11 disaster was a US government plot.” I’d love to see his evidence for this casual slur-by-association.

The distinction he tries to make between “scepticism” (good, up to a point, he thinks) and “denialism” (bad, obviously) is in any case a straw man argument. Of all the sceptics I’ve ever met or read, not a single one has ever striven to deny that climate changes nor that modest global warming has been taking place since 1850 (when we began emerging from the Little Ice Age).

What many of these sceptics – or deniers, if you must – do question is