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BBC impartiality and climate change

Tony at Harmless Sky has been following , for 18 months at least, development of BBC policy on the coverage of climate change.

He picks up on this line from a rather obscurely-titled BBC report on impartiality:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]. From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40

As Gareth in the comments points out, the seminar was one of the Real World seminars the BBC holds each year, where execs from the corporation get together to debate particular issues. In 2006, it was focused on climate change. This line from the report worried Tony enough to send the BBC a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and I agree that the response from the BBC is far from satisfying. One reason perhaps is that the Real World workshop quoted was held under Chatham House Rules, so the BBC are stuck in being unable to release information about who attended the seminar.

Tony’s post has been picked up by some other bloggers, one of whom I’ve had debate with recently, who take this as proof that the BBC is proselytising the ‘climate alarmism’ cause (again, on alarmism, see my post on James Risbey’s work). There is a ‘fabulously interesting and in-depth’ post on the Hockey Stick Graph debate over at As with Bishop Hill’s views on the BBC’s position on climate change, I’m not so sure…. More »

Tags: BBC, climate change, impartiality

‘Oil is everything’: Burn Up on BBC2

“Doubt is our product. We manufacture doubt.” So says Mack, the bastard PR-lobbyist in last night’s BBC2 climate change drama, Burn Up.

It wasn’t a bad attempt at taking on climate change in a dramatic made-for-TV format. The first turns at addressing a new social/political phenomena are always going to be a little cliched. Some of the first literary attempts failed by being too directly about climate change. Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, for example, and the 2nd and 3rd books of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy. Compare to the later mastery of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which doesn’t mention the issue directly, not once.

Burn Up didn’t fail in the same way. It’s TV, not literature, and can be saved by drama. Written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) and produced by the makers of Spooks, it has the pedigree. More »

Tags: BBC, climate change, media coverage, programming

BBC website: experiments in convergence

It hasn’t exactly crept up on me. I was aware of the BBC plans, as I was working on a similar design build at my last editorial management job. Ajax technology, the dashboard, coverging media, putting the user in control as the philosophy behind the new careers site, Creative Choices. But now the BBC changes are here, like a number of other people (and not all of us are naturally averse to change) I’m very unsure. No, I’m clear. It’s the turning back of the clock… the ‘room to breathe’…

I’m not talking about summer. As one of the most popular sites in the UK, a large percentage of the online audience will have noticed, and had a reaction to, the BBC’s new design. Reading the Sports Editor’s blog on how the changes have filtered down to BBC Sport the revamp is explained as a need to maintain pace with convergence:

Much of the talk in media and technology circles is around convergence, with the boundaries between radio, TV and new media blurring all the time. Audiences are entitled, and increasingly expect, to get the best mix of words, still images, moving pictures, audio and interactivity in one place, on a single platform.

 

That’s what we need to be able to offer our users, which means updating both the look and feel and the functionality of bbc.co.uk/sport.

This makes sense for a big hitter as the BBC, and you can see the importance to the corporation of adaptation.

The Sports Editor has also done a welcome chronological montage of the major site changes over the last eight years, from yellow back pages and Web1.0 right bang up to date with new technologies such as AJAX for its drag’n'drop homepage dashboard, reminiscent of netvibes.com and iGoogle. The problems as I see them are… More »

Tags: advertising, BBC, convergence, design