Source: BBC Radio 4: Feedback
URL: N/A
Date: 12/04/2019
Event: David Shukman: "I think we're slightly allergic to campaigns"
Credit: BBC Radio 4: Feedback
People:
Roger Bolton: Finally, from Brexit to Donald Trump, from the Christchurch killings to the floods in Mozambique, it's hardly been a slow year for news. But for many of our correspondents, there is one topic of supreme importance that has been greatly underplayed.
Male voice: My name's Magnus, I'm 21 and I’m a student and I think whilst issues like Brexit are really important to young people like me, I think in 50 or 100 years that’s not going to be the issue that matters - it’s going to be the climate and the fact that the climate's been destroyed. I think people need to be caring about that now.
Female voice: Elizabeth Bulkeley [?] - for an issue as vital and important as this, the BBC is still treating it as a trivial sideshow.
Female voice: I am Rose from Cumbria - the BBC should be doing so much more to inform and encourage debate on this. For instance, I haven’t ever heard Simon Jack or other business correspondents probe business leaders about their carbon reduction plans.
Male voice: My name's James from Warwickshire, and I just wanted to say I was very pleased to see that there's increasing coverage of environmental issues on Radio Four. I think it’s really important to try and bring these issues to the fore.
Male voice: My name is Christopher Padley - we frequently get news items which are extremely pertinent to the environment and climate change which never mention it. There'll be things like talking about - let’s say airport expansion, and there isn’t a link made. What policies do they have for ensuring that related topics are connected, in questioning?
Roger Bolton: So how does the BBC decide what to cover about climate change and how to cover it? I am now joined by two people who have to make those decisions - Deborah Cohen, the Science Editor for BBC Radio and David Shukman, Science Editor for BBC News. So let me start first of all with you, David Shukman - do you think the coverage of climate change is prominent enough?
David Shukman: Like any reporter, I'd like my subject to be given prime-time slots every night. We are in an extraordinarily busy news period with Brexit dominating so much, so now and again I will try to raise my hand and flag up some important development. I think, by and large, if you take a longer view, so don’t just look back over the last couple of months but look back over the last decade or so, 15 years, I would say we’ve got quite a good track record of covering all the main - certainly research efforts into climate change, all of the policy issues, all of the issues about how it affects individual people, but I think if people are sensing that they’re not getting enough climate news right now, the answer may be that because climate change is a process, without so many immediate issues like Brexit crowding into the news agenda, that we do sometimes get a bit squeezed.
Roger Bolton: Deborah Cohen, you obviously try to cover climate change in the programmes that you are directly responsible for, but how about your wider influence? Picking up that point - you know, Simon Jack, Business Editor, when he’s talking to companies, should he not be raising this issue? Do you have any influence over people like Simon Jack?
Deborah Cohen: Er, no, I can’t say we do have any influence, you know. I think the fact that we do - you know, we've covered a lot more climate stories within programmes like Inside Science, we’ve had climate scientists on The Life Scientific, which has given us an opportunity to explore the research in a bit more detail than you might get on the news, but unfortunately the BBC is such a large organisation that we don’t really have any control over what -
Roger Bolton: So you do you think, in a way, you’re all stuck in silos? You're doing the best you can, but somebody over here is doing something different and overall in the BBC I think some of our listeners think there should be a sort of edict from above - climate change is so important, and this is particularly coming from younger listeners, it should be almost in everything.
Deborah Cohen: Well, I think you need a bit of variety - I think you do need to have different speakers and slightly different takes on stories in different programmes, because I think otherwise it does become that the BBC would be - it would be very uniform. So it’s important for business to be talking about it and for - you know, artistic responses to things, you know, we’ve had, you know, John Lanchester‘s book that was on Radio Four just recently, which is climate fiction, you know, looking ahead there's a podcast that's come out of Radio Four called Forest 404 that’s looking futuristically, but I am afraid I don’t think there will ever be an edict from on high that everyone will do the same thing.
David Shukman: I mean, edicts culturally don’t generally go down very well with fiercely independent programme makers, but you are right that there is a silo mentality and that’s a historic thing, that broadly, in a newsroom you have correspondents who try to keep watch on different ministries and those that are visions that seem to perpetuate for a very long time. We have tried in different ways to engage other bits of the newsroom in the climate stories, so for example during the Paris summit that led to the famous Paris Agreement 2015, the business unit got very much involved in the coverage of the business angle there, because one of the big shifts has been in the last 10 years is the engagement of the corporate sector in this question.
Roger Bolton: But where does this stop short of campaigning, because a lot of young people and a lot of others who are very deeply concerned about what is happening - very, very deeply concerned - and think actually your responsibility, given the future of the planet is at stake, is to campaign. Can you campaign, Deborah Cohen?
Deborah Cohen: No, I don’t think we don’t [sic] campaign - we want to keep our journalistic distance, such that we can question things and I don’t think we're ever campaigning in programmes. You know, I think our role is to ask questions of researchers, in my case, or, you know, to challenge people to understand why they're saying what they're saying.
David Shukman: I think we're slightly allergic to campaigns, if I may say. I mean, I think - without being too sort of purist about this - I mean, we have a different job. If we're a correspondent, the job is to report whatever the latest developments are. If people want to campaign off their own bat as a result of that, fine, but it definitely, I think, as soon as you cross the line or are perceived to have crossed the line people accuse us of having crossed a line and becoming a campaigner -
Roger Bolton: On a range of things -
David Shukman: - on a range of things -
Roger Bolton: Like Europe, particularly at the moment, almost on any particular issue, and that's very dangerous, I think, for us. But - this is a question that keeps coming up, I know, but it is that the BBC policy which says we are not going to have what might be loosely called a "climate change denier" on the airwaves?
Deborah Cohen: In the programmes that I’m responsible for, which are science-based programmes, we would - if someone published a paper in a reputable journal that questioned some of the research and we felt that this was something that was worth looking at, then we would put that person on air and we would question them in a lot of detail as to where the research came from, but as a matter of course, the BBC has moved beyond thinking that every time you do a story on climate change you have to have a sceptic to argue against it. You can have a big discussion about what you do and how you deal with it the issue - that is an area of debate.
David Shukman: My understanding is that you try, in your choice of guests and in your coverage, to give what's called "due weight" to where the science lies and you try and reflect where the body of the evidence lies. That's very different from saying if someone’s got an expertise in a particular field like energy that they shouldn’t have a major contribution to a debate about what is the right policy in future.
Roger Bolton: David Shukman, Deborah Cohen, thank you very much. And that's all for Feedback for this week and for another series. I'll be back in June. Please do keep your comments coming in, and remember - it is your BBC. You pay for it, you own it. Around the time that this programme was launched, 40 years ago, the very idea that the views of listeners deserved an airing was the subject of derision. As the Times put it:
Male voice: The listeners are as sour as old and dried-up lemons, constantly grizzling about musical jingles, sex, bad language, morbid themes, reception problems, scheduling, regional accents and less about what programmes said or signified. Listeners are simply not well enough informed to pass judgement.
Roger Bolton: Thank you, for spending 40 years proving that wrong.