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.
In June of the same year, the BBC published an 80-page report with the astonishingly obscure title, From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel. Now there may be quite a few people who are concerned about the odd wheel coming off our national broadcaster’s wagon, but why would they be talking about see-saws? A subtitle on the cover of the report sheds some light on this mystery, but not much: safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century’. The connection between this relatively straightforward expression of intent, wagon wheels, and seasaws is explained in excruciating detail in the early pages of the report, but thankfully it is not the subject of this post.
In fact, once one has got past the silly title, the report is very interesting, even courageous in its attempt to confront a difficult problem. This seems to be a genuine attempt to address concerns that editorial policy at the BBC too often reflects the views of its young, metropolitan, university educated, middle class, mildly left of centre employees, rather than the full spectrum of public opinion. This problem is not just the preserve of people who sign letters of complaint, ‘disgusted, Tonbridge Wells’ but as the report makes clear, it is also causing alarm among senior staff within the organisation.
Not surprisingly, I thumbed through From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel to see if it included any attempt to justify the blatantly partisan line that the BBC takes in the climate change debate. I was not disappointed.
Skilfully dovetailed into a section that also considers the problems of reporting Holocaust denial impartially, I found a few paragraphs dealing with what the Corporation obviously considers to be an equally tedious and morally reprehensible group: climate change sceptics. Immediately it became clear why Jeremy Paxman had felt able to be so forthright about editorial policy on the climate change debate in his article. This is what the report says:
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 [on anthropogenic climate change].
From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40
That sentence worried me. Years of watching the BBC’s coverage of this subject – with growing astonishment – during which numerous ‘scientific experts’ who clearly hold very partisan views on climate change, have been interviewed to provide viewers with what they were lead to believe were objective opinions on the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, has made me despair of BBC impartiality. I am thinking of people like George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Professor Chris Rapley, Lord May of Oxford, Sir David King and Professor Tom Burke in particular. Anyone who has followed this controversy will be well aware that, although such people may be experts on the subject, they are anything but impartial or objective.
In an attempt to discover whether the BBC had organised this seminar in order to acquaint itself with the issues, or whether the purpose had been to obtain some kind of spurious authority for an editorial policy that had long since become ingrained in their news coverage, I thought that it would be worth trying to find out who had been invited to advise them. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations I made the following request to the BBC for information:
1. What was the name or title given to this seminar?
2. Where and when was this seminar held?
3. When did the seminar start and when did it end.
4. A copy of the invitation that was sent to prospective participants.
5. The agenda for the seminar together with any notes that were provided for the participants.
6. The names of all those who were invited to attend the seminar as participants, observers or in any other capacity together with their job description, organizational affiliation’s or any other information relating to their eligibility for being invited to be present.
7. The names of all those who attended the seminar as participants, observers or in any other capacity together with their job description, organizational affiliation’s or any other information relating to their eligibility for being invited to be present.
8. Any minutes, notes, electronic communications, recorded material or other records of the proceedings of the seminar.
Letter to the BBC, 20th July, 2007
Eventually I received their response:
In this case, the information you have requested is outside the scope of the Act because information relating to the seminar is held to help inform the arc’s editorial policy around reporting climate change. The only exception to this is the logistic details which you have requested
In this respect I can confirm that the seminar was called ‘Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting’ and was held at the BBC’s Television Centre in White City London on 26 January 2006. The seminar ran from 9.30am to 5.30prn.
We are also happy to voluntarily provide you with some further information relating to the seminar.
The attendees at the seminar were made up of 30 key BBC staff and 30 invited guests who are specialists in the area of climate change. It was hosted by Jana Bennett, Director of Vision (then Television), BBC and Helen Boaden, Director of News BBC. It was chaired by Fergal Keane, Special Correspondent with BBC News. The key speaker at the seminar was Robert McCredie, Lord May of Oxford.
Seminar had the following aims:
- · To offer a clear summary of the state of knowledge on the issue
- · To find where the main debates lie
- · To invoke imagination to allow the media to deal with the scope of the issue
- · To consider the BBC’s role in public debate.
Letter from the BBC, 21st August, 2007
So we know that Lord May, an ex-government chief scientific adviser, ex-president of the Royal Society and a vehement advocate of climate alarmism played an important role in the proceedings. But apparently the BBC would prefer that just about everything else to do with a seminar which formed their editorial policy on a matter of immense public importance should remain a secret.
There may be people outside the realms of the BBC and environmental activism who would attempt to justify this decision, but I doubt if there are many.
As the BBC does not offer any internal review procedure when a request under the
Freedom of Information Act is refused, I referred my application to the Information Commissioner’s Office for adjudication. After a delay of almost a year, they are just beginning to investigate. Future developments will be reported on this blog.
108 Responses to “Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information”
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Hi Tony, re Susan Watts and Newsnight, I suspect that the reason why she said what she said was to remain on-message. She could as well have said something like: “In 2007, Arctic sea ice was at its lowest for many years. This year, the ice extent appears to have recovered somewhat, but who knows how long the recovery may last? Hopefully, this voyage may provide some answers.” Which would have been accurate, as far as I know, but would have left viewers thinking about the fact that sea ice fluctuates, and that it isn’t all a one-way road to an ice-free Arctic. Instead, she appears to have wanted to elicit speculation (and unease) about sea ice vanishing altogether, which makes the ending of the report far from impartial – basically another little tap of the hammer to help drive the desired message home.
Tony: in my post 48 I noted that not only did Lord May claim, in his valedictory address to the Royal Society, that
But he compounded this by going on to say that
I suspect that some RS members may have been embarrassed that their departing President chose to use this occasion to make such absurd and unsubstantiated claims – insulting to the professional integrity of other scientists.
Peter Martin,
the Royal Society, formerly a highly regarded scientific institution, lost all credibility when it recently gave an award for ‘Best Science book’ to a piece of hysterical alarmism by an environmental activist (Mark Lynas, ‘Six degrees’).
Re #76, Alex Cull
I agree with every word that you say, but surly the BBC has no business dealing in messages.The From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel report, which I quoted from above, makes this very clear too.
There seems to be a disjunction between the BBC’s aspirations and reality when it comes to reporting on climate change.
Maybe the BBC is beginning to listen. Today it’s giving surprising prominence on its website’s “science and nature” section to a report headed “World heading towards cooler 2008” and going on to say,
However, it cannot of course leave it at that and reassures its audience that
Robin
There are another couple of examples of Lord May’s seemingly casual attitude to evidence supporting his arguments here.
Robin,
“I believe that position should have been put to those fellows for peer review and a membership vote before publication. Do you know if that happened?”
Your question demonstrates a lack of knowledge on how the Royal Society, in particular, and science , in general, works.
25 or so years ago the position of the Royal Society on the AGW issue, would have been more to your liking. It didn’t change to be the way it is because of a vote, or agitation by any pressure group. It happened slowly. Opinions changed as the evidence came in, leading to the emergence of a new consensus. If you sceptics are right, and the world is headed for a new ice age or whatever, opinions will change again if new evidence emerges to support that view.
The whole concept of this thread, at least as applied to scientific matters, is flawed. It may be acceptable for the BBC to be impartial, as far as is possible, on political issues but it cannot be impartial when it comes to science. A quick look around the internet will unearth all kinds of websites claiming that Einstein was wrong, or that Quantum mechanics must be wrong because it violates this or that philosophical principle. I’ve previously mentioned the the ‘Flat Earth’ society which is still alive and kicking apparently.
Robin, PaulM, and PatK, and may not like my suggestion of the Royal Society, nevertheless they have not suggested any alternative, but there does need to be an arbiter to which the BBC can turn when it needs to be advised on scientific matters to prevent it from being attacked politically, over a scientific issue, as it is on this thread.
Tony, I agree re the gap between the BBC’s aspirations and reality, when it comes to reporting climate-related matters. The science is unsettled; as people such as Steve McIntyre have shown, IMO this is another symptom of the lack of due diligence on the part of governments and the media prior to nailing their flags to the AGW mast. The amount of spin demonstrated in BBC climate-related online news articles (e.g. their recent Bangladesh land-area report) just says to me: politics.
Peter: I suggest you confine your silly points – comparing for example those who doubt that AGW will have catastrophic consequences to those who claim Einstein was wrong or those who believe the world is flat – to Tony’s New Statesman continuation thread.
This thread is about determining the BBC’s impartiality (or otherwise) on climate change. As part of that discussion it is considering the desirability of knowing more about a “high level seminar” on the issue attended by BBC executives and, in particular, the names of the “best scientific experts” who, it is understood, took part in the seminar. My personal position is that, as a BBC licence fee payer, I believe I am entitled to expect openness about this – I see no valid reason for it’s being kept secret.
Robin,
I do remember also being called ‘silly’ by my mother, years ago, when I tried to explain to her the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat. I think the remark would have come at just about the time I reached the point of the cat being simultaneously alive and dead.
You say that this thread is about determining the BBC’s impartiality (or otherwise) on climate change. The BBC has said that it is not impartial, and have stated why science and politics are different in this respect.
Two key questions that you might like to address are:
Should all scientific issues, or just the AGW controversy, be treated ‘impartially’ by the BBC?
Who should decide which issues are ‘silly’, such as the Flat Earth / Spherical Earth debate, and which aren’t?
Peter,
Explaining Schrodinger’s cat to ones mother is always going to be high risk ;-)
Sorry to butt in …..
Peter: you suggest (post 85) that I address “two key questions”. Fair enough:
(1) ?Should all scientific issues be treated ‘impartially’ by the BBC? ?
Yes.
(2) Who should decide which issues are ’silly’, such as the Flat Earth / Spherical Earth debate, and which aren’t?
First, I’m unaware of such a “debate”. But, if there is one, it’s a pseudo scientific issue and not a scientific issue: all scientists agree the earth is spherical. But suppose, for example, the position was that “based on the best available computer models, many scientists believe that it is very likely that the earth is spherical”, a position with which many scientists disagreed, maintaining it was flat. That would be a “scientific issue” and the BBC should treat it impartially. Yet the IPCC’s position on the cause of global warming is, if anything, rather less certain. Moreover, its “projections” (not predictions) of serious problems if GHG emissions are not curtailed are based, not on observation, but on computer models utilising questionable assumptions – including eight-year old scenarios of dubious economic and demographic validity. All this raises clear scientific issues and the BBC should treat them impartially.
I daresay you’ll ask how the BBC is to decide which issues are pseudo scientific and which scientific. I believe the BBC is staffed by highly intelligent people who are capable of distinguishing one from the other – it’s usually straightforward enough. But it can sometimes happen that they allow political or other pressures to cloud their judgement. Unnecessary secrecy can be a symptom of this – hence the subject matter of this thread. I suggest we get back to it.
Robin,
I don’t want to give the impression that conventional science is a monoculture of single opinion, bereft of all disagreement. There’s plenty of that in evolutionary theory and quantum mechanical theory for example.
So, too in climate science. For instance, the IPCC has published a range of climate sensitivity temperatures from 1.5deg C to 4.5deg C and naturally there are those who would favour the lower end of the range, and those the upper.
Perhaps you would like to make it clear whether you are arguing that the BBC should be more impartial between these two groups, or if you’d like climate sceptics, who apply terms like ‘hoax’, ‘scam’, ‘fraud’ and ‘charlatan’ to their opponents, to be given an equal share of TV time?
Of course there are many who would consider that science itself is wrong on a whole range of issues. Should the BBC be impartial in that debate too?
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is quite possible, and even likely, for one side simply to be wrong.
Peter: as you are well aware, you have set up a false dichotomy.
I have made my views clear on the matters you raised. I intend now to focus on the subject of this thread – in particular, the BBC’s secrecy about its seminar on a matter of great public interest. I suggest you do the same.
Robin,
If you’d like me to go away I’m sure that you could find a suitable combination of words to convey your meaning, but please don’t accuse me of straying off topic.
If you’d like to check, I think you’ll find that the title does include the word ‘impartial’. The points of my last few postings has been on the difficulty of defining the word to everyone’s satisfaction, and how it’s inappropriate to expect that the BBC should be impartial on all subjects.
Peter: see my post 87.
Peter
Looking back through your last few comments, it seems that you are arguing that it is acceptable for the BBC to take a position in the climate debate and then report what is happening from that point of view.
I understand that the BBC’s guidelines for producers require that climate change is presented as though there is no uncertainty and no longer any scope for rational debate on the subject. This is not the case and it is misleading.
The BBC has long been a major international brand which is based on impartial and accurate news reporting. Impairing that brand by being seen to be biased on a matter of such great importance is particularly dangerous at a time when the Corporation is under enormous pressure from the new web-based media.
All that is required is that the BBC should apply the same journalistic standards to the climate debate that they apply to party politics. In other words they should report all shades of opinion so that the public have the opportunity to make an informed decision about what they believe.
Tony,
All that is required is that the BBC should apply the same journalistic standards to the climate debate that they apply to party politics. In other words they should report all shades of opinion so that the public have the opportunity to make an informed decision about what they believe.
I think this is the key issue. At first glance, this all sounds reasonable enough, but if you think about it I think you should be able to appreciate that a scientific topic, and I have already explained why, requires a different approach.
I think you need to clarify whether you are asking for there to be a better coverage of the range of opinion which exists within the scientific mainstream, and which is a fair enough point to make, or if you are expecting the BBC to let those, with similar opinions to Christopher Monckton, loose with their allegations of hoaxes and charlatanism etc.
Most climate scientists are hard working, non-argumentative sorts of people. They are often happy to explain on TV the nature of the problem as they see it, and have reasoned polite discussion with other scientists in their field. That’s the way scientists work and many people would wish that our politicians behaved in a similar manner.
However they aren’t politicians as we all know them. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect scientists to have to cope with the sort of unwarranted verbal abuse that unqualified, misinformed climate sceptics would dearly like to throw at them and nor would they accept it.
Re: # 93, Peter
There can be no double standards for accurate and impartial reporting. In order for the BBC to preserve its reputation, it must apply best practice equally when dealing with both science and politics, particularly at a time when these two areas of public life have become intermixed.
The general public are not stupid, and they are well able to distinguish between truth and propaganda, experts and charlatans. For this reason they should not be left in ignorance of questions posed by articulate and well-informed sceptics like Monckton. If the sceptic’s point of view is not well founded, then what does the ‘consensus’ have to fear? If the ‘consensus’ can only be preserved by the climate debate in ways that are not impartial and accurate, then what does it tell us about the ‘consensus’?
For examples of ‘unwarrented verbal abuse’, try the utterances of Monbiot, Lynas (the pie man), Gelbspan, Romm (I’m sure that Robin can quote some good examples from that source), Lambert, Eli Rabett and many others who attempt to defend their alarmist dogma by vilifying those who disagree with them instead of responding to their arguments. Sceptics have not resorted to using a puerile and despicably abusive term like ‘climate denier’, nor have they any need to.
Tony,
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of including all the individuals you’ve mentioned. There are those on both sides of the argument who aren’t scientifically qualified, and the BBC would probably be better off shutting them all out completely.
If you want to learn about the science, the ones to listen to are qualified scientists. Christopher Monckton may be articulate, but is he well informed? Most scientists would think not. No one is saying that the general public are stupid, but the BBC isn’t like the Daily Mail. It does have a duty to report the truth, and not pander to those who would seek to confuse them. The famous Frank Luntz memo is object lesson in how to do just that, and create doubt and uncertainty in the public mind for political reasons.
There have been, and still are, disputes between science and various groups, which the BBC has always handled sensitively, but, ultimately, they have always sided with the pro-science side of the argument. You are asking the BBC to change its long standing policy on scientific reporting, by suggesting that science and the anti-AGW lobby (is that an acceptable term?) be put on an equal footing.
Peter Martin, msg.95 –
“that science and the anti-AGW lobby (is that an acceptable term?) be put on an equal footing.”
That, in itself, is an egregious, insulting statement which reflects badly on your ability to conduct reasoned debate.
There are respected, qualified scientists – many of them Heads of Department at prestigious Universities – whose knowledge and long experience of such sciences as Meteorology, or Climatology, entitle them to argue, if they so believe, that global warming is not caused by the obvious recent increased emission of man-made greenhouse gases. Their position gives them more right than most of us to argue their case on a scientific basis, and your cheap shot does you no credit.
I would be very interested in any new developments of your requests. As this comment section seems to end abruptly in Sept. of 2009 and it is currently Jan. of 2010 one would hope there has been some advance in the status.
I am also interested in re-visiting this topic and updating. I have made a number of formal complaints to BBC on bias in climate change reporting. Following the email exposure from the CRU in East Anglia (“ClimateGate”) I have complained again. Part of the reply just received refers again to the “wagon wheel” report and the panel of “scientific experts”. I know that an FOI has been turned down, but that was pre-Climategate. The BBC claimed it was under the banner of journalism that the seminar was held and therefore outside the scope of the FOI act and this was upheld by the commission. However, their defence against bias on climate change is still held to be the expert panel meeting of 26 January 2006. Were any of the members of that panel scientists that now appear in the ClimateGate emails?
ThinkingScientist #98 (and Rev Doctor #97)
This thread dates from August 2008 and was the first post that I put up on the subject. If you look under categories in the left-hand sidebar on this page you will find that there are over twenty subsequent posts dealing with the FOIA request and other BBC related matters. The most recent is dated 15th Dec 2009.
I would be very interested to know exactly what the BBC have said to you about the Wagon Wheel report, particularly if they are citing the 2006 seminar.
Just a follow-up of the “all important” Copenhagen summit…………all that expensive jet fuel shot to hell…….
Copenhagen goes from failure to farce. (Or maybe it’s the other way around)
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/22/steve-janke-copenhagen-goes-from-failure-to-farce-or-maybe-it-s-the-other-way-around.aspx