Amid the strongest evidence yet that humans have changed the climate, media reporting is giving sceptics too much of a free rein

Trusted: we expect climate truths not fiction from the BBC (Image: London News Pictures/Rex)

A damning verdict on the BBC’s coverage of climate change has just been delivered, and rightly so.

As the UK’s most trusted media outlet, the BBC is vital to the public debate, which is why the criticisms, published this week by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in its Communicating Climate Science report, are so important.

The BBC has some of the best science and environment correspondents in the world, but its coverage of climate issues is being hampered by extremely woolly thinking among editors and senior managers.


In his testimony to the committee last year, David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, revealed that the corporation’s management had decided to disregard a warning about the dangers of giving too much airtime and space to climate change sceptics, which was contained in a report for the BBC Trust by the geneticist Steve Jones.

Extraordinarily, Jordan also recalled long meetings about the BBC’s coverage of climate change with politicians Peter Lilley and Nigel Lawson, both known for their scepticism. He made no mention of any meetings with scientists.

The lobbying campaign by sceptics has clearly had an impact. The result has been a continued betrayal of the public interest. The BBC has frequently sacrificed accuracy in favour of a muddled notion of impartiality by broadcasting inaccurate and misleading statements from sceptics.

However, the corporation should not be seeking to be impartial between scientific facts and sceptic fictions, but should instead be objectively striving for the truth.

Live interviews with sceptics present the BBC with one of its biggest challenges – presenters lack detailed knowledge of the issues and are usually poorly briefed.

If the BBC wants to air the views of sceptics purely because they disagree with mainstream scientists, they should keep a record of those who persistently make inaccurate and misleading statements.

Then this register can be taken into account when making decisions about potential interviewees, and alert editors to the need to be extra vigilant.

At a recent debate on false balance in coverage, an additional potential solution was put forward by Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat MP who is now associate director of Hacked Off, which campaigns for the implementation of the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry, which examined media practices and ethics.

Harris suggested that every interview involving a sceptic should be followed by an objective analysis by one of the BBC’s science or environment correspondents, who would then have an opportunity to correct any false statements. This set-up is already used for political interviews on some news programmes, which are followed by a summary from a BBC political correspondent.

What is clear is that the BBC is harming the public interest by sacrificing accuracy for impartiality in its coverage of climate change. It should use the committee’s report as an opportunity to correct its flawed approach and so improve its service to the public.