To Improve Accuracy, BBC Tells Its Reporters To Stop Giving Air Time To Climate Deniers

Reporters for BBC News are being directed to significantly curb the amount of air time they give to people with anti-science viewpoints — including people who deny climate change exists — in order to improve the accuracy and fairness of the network’s news coverage, according to a report released by the BBC’s governing body on Thursday.

The BBC Trust’s report was designed to assess the network’s impartiality in science coverage — in other words, whether it is staying neutral on critical issues. In order to be neutral when covering science, however, the BBC noted it needs to avoid “false balance,” a fallacy that occurs when two sides of an argument are assumed to have equal value.

“Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given,” the report said.

The type of “false balance” news segment that the BBC is now actively trying to avoid with regard to climate change is one that is fairly typical in American network news. It involves putting one person who is well-versed on climate science next to a person who denies climate science, and having them debate.

Editorially, this type of debate makes the network look like it’s being balanced, giving equal opportunity to opposite viewpoints. However, because 95 to 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to warm, that balance is false, giving disproportionate time to a viewpoint that is widely rejected in the scientific community.

In order to have a truly balanced and statistically representative debate about climate change, television news networks would have to pit 97 climate scientists against three climate deniers. Because that likely wouldn’t work very well, the BBC is favoring an approach that instead severely limits the amount of air time climate deniers are given.

So far, the report said, approximately 200 staff members have attended seminars and workshops aimed at improving the balance of their science coverage.

The BBC Trust’s report did note that climate deniers wouldn’t be completely excluded from the conversation.

“The Trust also would like to reiterate that … ‘this does not mean that critical
opinion should be excluded. Nor does it mean that scientific research shouldn’t be properly scrutinized,’” the report said. “The BBC has a duty to reflect the weight of scientific agreement but it should also reflect the existence of critical views appropriately. Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC’s output what weight to give to critical voices.”

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