Source: BBC Radio 4: Feedback
URL: N/A
Date: 04/07/2014
Event: Alison Hastings: "I don't think the Trust or Steve Jones has ever wanted to close down" debate
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
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Roger Bolton: ... But first, should this man be allowed on air?
Bob Carter: ... climate has always changed and it always will - there is nothing unusual about the modern magnitudes or rates of change of temperature, of ice volume, of sea level or of extreme weather events.
Roger Bolton: That was Professor Bob Carter from the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change or NIPCC on Radio 4's World at One, last September. His appearance on the programme led to a tidal wave of protests from Feedback listeners, concerned at the high profile given to a well-known climate change sceptic.
Anjana Ahuja: Hello, I'm Anjana Ahuja. I'm not your typical listener, because I write about and comment on scientific issues for national newspapers, and I'm also a massive BBC fan, and I love the science and environment coverage, I think it's very well informed and fair and balanced. And I think this made the Wato report stick out more, because Bob Carter was allowed to dominate the airwaves and then climate scientists were given the right of reply. And I think this item, this report fell short of the mark.
Simon Sharp: Hello, my name is Simon Sharp and I'm calling from London. It's very poor-quality journalism to present climate change as being a matter of political opinion, over which some kind of debate is taking place. If you do arrange a conversation between qualified climate scientists, then you'll find that they largely agree, and the idea of there being a debate about the fundamentals of this is artificial.
Roger Bolton: So, was Wato wrong to give as much airtime to Professor Carter as to a qualified climate scientist? The BBC Trust - the final arbiter of complaints to the Beeb - has now ruled on the matter. Alison Hastings is the Chair of the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee. I asked her why the Trust had rejected nearly all the complaints.
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Alison Hastings: We felt that Dr. Carter had been rigorously challenged on what he had said, by the presenter, and of course we looked at the piece as a whole. You had a variety of other contributors, including Ed Davey, who was the Cabinet Minister responsible for this, who was very supportive of what this report had put out, and you had one of the authors. And so you look at the piece in the round, and on this occasion, we didn't uphold the complaint.
Roger Bolton: Now you did find against the BBC in one relatively small area, when you talked about Professor Bob Carter being funded by an organisation which - and the details of that ought to have been more explicit, within the programme. The script - the presenter should have made that clearer.
Alison Hastings: Dr. Carter, I think, was rigorously challenged on a lot of what he said, but he - he did mention how he was funded, and he wasn't maybe as open about it, and he wasn't challenged on it. And because there is speculation around some of the funding being linked to the oil industry, does that negate him having an opinion? Clearly not. Would that be something that the audience should know, to know how to weight what he's saying? We think that they should.
Roger Bolton: So when you've got guests on the programme, you're saying to programme-makers "You must research their background, who finances their research, and if it's relevant, you must tell the audience, so the audience properly understands -"
Alison Hastings: Yes.
Roger Bolton: "- where people are coming from".
Alison Hastings: And 99% of the time, the BBC do that, anyway - that's part of the researcher's job, you would always want to understand, on issues like this, where people are coming from, and it happens all the time. It's rarely a problem for the BBC.
Roger Bolton: Also this week, the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit, or ECU, which is effectively the layer below the Trust in the BBC complaints procedure, has delivered its preliminary ruling on another case of perceived false balance, when Lord Lawson appeared on the Today programme, debating climate change with the climatologist Sir Brian Hoskins. This was in February this year.
Nigel Lawson: ...whatever nature throws at us, whether there's a climate element or not. Water storage, when there's drought -
Justin Webb: Surely the wise thing... Can I just put this to you -
Nigel Lawson: - flood defences, sea defences -
Liz Mandeville: My name is Liz Mandeville and I live in Lewes in Sussex, and I was seriously disturbed by the interview. It seems to me an extraordinary idea of balance that's involved here - to say that when you have a whole group of people, all experts in their field, who say one thing, balance means finding somebody with no expertise in that area to say the opposite.
Nigel Lawson: - and there's been no recorded warming over the past 15, 16, 17 years -
Justin Webb: Well, that's - oh yeah, there is a lot of controversy about that.
Nigel Lawson: No, there's not - that's a fact.
Neil Spencer: My name is Neil Spencer, I live in Ashreigney in North Devon. I was really shocked to hear how easy it was for Nigel Lawson to dominate the discussion and then the interview sort of moved rapidly from the scientific serious [?] discussion, for Lord Lawson to make a series of what I felt were very unsubstantiated and unchallenged scientific assertions and generalisations. The interviewer made really little effort to challenge these highly politicised, unscientific views, in my view.
Roger Bolton: Now in its ruling, the ECU upheld the complaints, saying there was a false balance here, because the implication was that Lord Lawson's views on climate change were on an equal footing with those of Sir Brian Hoskins. So you accept the argument that there can be false balance in these discussions.
Alison Hastings: Yes, I absolutely do accept that. And that came out of the report that we did, an impartiality review on science, with Professor Steve Jones. There can be false balance, and I think the BBC strives very hard to dry to avoid it. Looking at those two cases, I think that just goes to show that you have to treat each of these on a case by case - you will never get two reports exactly the same. You will look at each one, whether it's us or the ECU, will come to a decision based on the facts and against the guidelines.
Roger Bolton: Can we explore this idea of false balance a little more? As Steve Jones told me, you - an example would be, an extreme example, even -
Alison Hastings: Yes.
Roger Bolton: He said; would you get a mathematician in who says "two plus two is four", you get somebody who isn't a mathematician, who comes in: "two plus two plus [sic] five". That's false balance. But it's a bit more difficult when, what - 95% of people believe, say -
Alison Hastings: Yes.
Roger Bolton: - in some particular aspect of science, 5% don't. How do you decide what actually constitutes false balance?
Alison Hastings: So there is an agreement from a very large proportion of scientists that there is climate change going on at the moment and that there is a man-made element to that. There clearly is a very big debate that needs to be had about what you want to do about that. If you are specifically talking about science, and the consensus that's there, I think the audience have a right to expect that they know where the contributors are coming from, they know their background, they know their status.
Roger Bolton: But what we're talking about here is whether they take part at all. Because the argument of Professor Jones is: on certain subjects, he says the scientific consensus is such that it's now a fact, and shouldn't really be debated.
Alison Hastings: Yes, and what you'd have had in that piece that we looked at, was there still being a debate about the acceleration of that, about the timing of that, and there is more of a spectrum of opinion on that. And I don't think the Trust or Steve Jones has ever wanted to close down that, as long as the audience understand the status of the people who - who are giving potentially an opposing view.
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Roger Bolton: Our thanks to Alison Hastings, Chair of the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee.