Why Peter Sissons is wrong about BBC climate coverage

Peter Sissons' attack on political correctness at the BBC will probably resonate with some of my friends who work there. Sissons was not the only seasoned reporter insulted by the compulsory Safeguarding Trust course - though interestingly all the journalists I spoke to, like Sissons, had a more positive experience on the course than they expected. 

And I share his discomfort at the use of vox pops as any kind of valid representation of public opinion.

But his attack on the failure of the BBC to report both sides of the climate change debate (above) is barely recognisable.

Sissons' argument that some BBC bosses at times got close to abandoning some of their beloved impartiality on climate change partly rings true. One long-serving BBC journalist told me that Mark Thompson's supportive introduction to Al Gore on his visit to Television Centre to promote his climate change film An Inconvenient Truth was unprecedented in BBC history.

Another reported that a senior BBC boss assured a room of scientists that a particular climate sceptic would never appear on the airwaves on his watch. Never? Really?

I also remember an email exchange with a leading scientist after the Live Earth concert was screened by the BBC together with a running commentary from a string of A-list celebs. The scientist was demanding to know what the Science Media Centre (SMC, of which I am the Director) planned to do about the appearance of David Baddiel, who threw a spanner in the carefully choreographed works by coming out as a dyed-in-the-wool climate sceptic. My immediate reply was that I would do absolutely nothing about Baddiel unless I could also challenge the banal, and in many cases much more stupid, scientific claims peddled by the 'supportive' celebs. In this debate sceptics do not have a monopoly on bad science.

But the rest of Sissons' insights are selective and misleading. For every BBC boss who got over-excited about Al Gore or over-censorious about sceptics, I can point to another who fought with science reporters on a daily basis, often demanding that every news report on a complex new piece of climate science be reported through a 'disco' (discussion) between the researchers and 'A Sceptic' - irrespective of their expertise.

Sissons' claims that the time given to minority views was 'practically zero' and that the phones of the sceptics never rang are just not true. At the SMC, I have been dealing with BBC journalists reporting climate change for eight years now - covering much of the period that Sissons complains about. Yet, despite the fact that we reflect the mainstream view of climate change, our phones rang many times with BBC journalists searching for sceptics to 'balance' their news item.

Sceptics like Benny Peiser and Bjorn Lomburg have become household names to BBC audiences and, off the top of his head, the BBC science and environment reporter David Shukman reels off a list of sceptics he alone has interviewed: Nigel Lawson, Penny Peiser, Viscount Monckton, Richard Linzden and David Holland, to name but a few.

Where Sissons sees 'zero' sceptics, the scientists I know see a plague of them.

Indeed, if I am asked what is the single greatest complaint about journalism from the scientific community in the past eight years, it would have to be the anger among climate researchers at the BBC's devotion to balancing every climate science story with a sceptical view.

I have written about the dangers of journalistic balance applied to science before but, like so many aspects of the climate change debate, the discussion has become unhelpfully polarised and overly simplistic - with journalists like Sissons seeing any report that does not include both sides as 'propaganda' and some in science arguing for something close to a blanket ban.

Neither is right. What is needed is a more intelligent journalism - an attempt to select interviewees who can enlighten us on a complex subject and guide us somewhere closer to the truth. It seems to me that Sissons' demand for more sceptics - any old sceptics! - is just as crude.

Discussions about the wider impact of climate change and how we tackle it should include many voices. But the advice - lambasted by Sissons - that the weight of evidence on the basic science no longer justifies equal space being given to the tiny minority of scientific sceptics is absolutely right, and a bold move from the BBC. 

For me, the biggest failure of science journalism in the past decade was demonstrated by an opinion poll which showed that more than 60% of the public understood from the media that medical science was divided about the safety of the MMR vaccine - when it isn't.

Conversely, that similar polls now show most people in the UK accept that climate scientists are agreed on the basics is something that the BBC should be proud of.

But I have also long argued that a more intelligent choice of guests would shed light on the real debates within mainstream science on the remaining uncertainties, especially around the future projections. Scientists facing Lord Lawson in a BBC studio are unlikely to focus on the gaps in knowledge when he is attacking the whole of climate science.

My views on climate change are rooted in eight years of running climate science press briefings at the SMC - privileged access that has left my confidence in the integrity of the UK's climate research unshaken.

Climate science does not need special favours from journalism: it can withstand all the scrutiny, scepticism and curiosity the BBC wants to throw at it. And, where it falls short, the role of journalism is to expose that. Few would argue that any section of the media has got climate change right. But, as we await the BBC Trust review on science, we need an honest and intelligent analysis of its climate change coverage.

Fiona Fox is Director of the Science Media Centre - an independent press office working on the front line between the national news media and science on controversial issues.