The false balance issue has been long recognized in the climate change debate – now some action by the BBC has been taken to redress this.
LSE Press release 26 June, 2014 ‘Responding to the decision by the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit to uphold a complaint about an interview with Lord Lawson on climate change on the ‘Today’ programme on BBC Radio 4 on 13 February 2014, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science, said:
“I am very glad that the BBC has reversed its initial decision to defend the broadcast of the interview with Lord Lawson during which he made a number of inaccurate and misleading statements about climate change. He wrongly claimed that scientists had not made any link between the winter flooding in the UK in 2014 and climate change, that there was no evidence for an increase in any extreme weather events, and that there had been no global warming over the past 15 years. All of these statements were demonstrably false. To read more click here
This has also been picked up on in the Telegraph, whose headline ran ‘BBC staff told to stop inviting cranks on to science programmes
BBC Trust says 200 senior managers trained not to insert ‘false balance’ into stories when issues were non-contentious. To read more click here
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