Even Andrew Marr worries about groupthink at the BBC

Posted by TonyN on 29/08/2008 at 8:27 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 8 Responses »
Aug 292008

BBC bashing is a favourite sport on the internet, and on blogs in particular. It’s easy, because no news organisation can please everyone all the time, and particularly not one that at least aspires to be impartial in its reporting. Most of us hold partisan opinions on a variety of subjects, so being confronted with arguments that suggest that we may be mistaken is likely to be disconcerting and annoying. This often leads to strenuous venting in the blogosphere along the lines of, ‘Trendy lefties are at it again. What do you expect from the BBC.’Such outbursts can easily be dismissed as knuckleheaded spleen, but you don’t have to look far to find confirmation that there is almost certainly some truth in them. For instance here is something rather startling that appeared in the BBC’s impartiality report last year:

Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 66

It is not just the thrust of this quotation that is startling, Continue reading »

More tropical storms at the Met Office?

Posted by TonyN on 22/08/2008 at 9:46 am The Climate No Responses »
Aug 222008

In the early days of Harmless Sky, just a few months ago, I posted a couple of times about the Met Office’s habit of exaggerating ‘evidence’ of climate change: here and here. I’ve had no reason to visit the Media Centre on their website for a while now because there have been no apocalyptic stories about ‘warmest ever’, ‘wettest ever’ or ‘dryest ever’ in the media. But last night I noticed a link on another site I was looking at and clicked it just to see what they are up to these days. This is what I found.

Atlantic tropical storm season set to top the average

Now, when someone says that a thing is ‘set to top the average’, it’s reasonable to assume that the bulk of the data is already available, the trend is clear, and there is little doubt about what the final figures will be. But then I remembered that what is usually referred to as ‘the hurricane season’ runs from July to November, and we are now only in the middle of August, so the season has only just begun. Continue reading »

Climate Change, BBC Impartiality, and ‘Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer'

Posted by TonyN on 16/08/2008 at 1:45 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 2 Responses »
Aug 162008

My last post, Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information, seems to have attracted a good deal of attention, but unfortunately it is unlikely that there will be any major developments in the near future. The Information Commissioner’s Office has warned me that, although they have begun to investigate, progress is likely to be slow.
In the meantime, here is something that I came across at about the same time that I made my Freedom of Information Act request about the BBC’s climate change seminar. The following transcript is taken from an edition of Radio4’s Talking Politics programme (broadcast on 4th August 2007) which was devoted to the Corporation’s problems with impartiality.

Presenter: One of Yes minister’s creators, Anthony Jay, has written a pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. Continue reading »

Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information

Posted by TonyN on 06/08/2008 at 11:03 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 108 Responses »
Aug 062008

In February 2007, an article that Jeremy Paxman had originally written for Ariel, the BBC’s house magazine, was published on the Newsnight website. It included this remarkable statement about global warming:

I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour.

I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago. But it strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible. [My emphasis]

Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight Homepage 02/02/2007

This stark admission of partisan reporting by the BBC – coming from someone who has been at the centre of current affairs broadcasting for decades – was a surprise to me, not because I was unaware of bias on this subject, but because someone so highly placed in the organisation was prepared to make such a frank admission. Continue reading »

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