The BBC has launched an internal investigation into the woeful shortcomings of its climate coverage. Did the Director-General read Paul Homewood’s article documenting 50 instances when the BBC has published or broadcast climate misinformation? The Telegraph has more.
The broadcaster has decided to review its climate and energy policy reporting after a string of controversies. It has been forced to make a series of corrections, with some programmes being removed altogether.
It comes with the BBC at the centre of a bias row after the Telegraph published a leaked letter, which had been sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser.
He wrote of his “despair at inaction” by executives over widespread evidence of skewed reporting. …
Now the broadcaster will face fresh scrutiny on its climate coverage, with its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee deciding to carry out a “thematic review” of its coverage of “energy policy in the UK and climate change”.
This would make it the latest in a series of reviews on impartiality carried out by the BBC in recent years.
They are part of its 10-point impartiality plan which was introduced in 2021, following an inquiry into the scandal surrounding the 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, involving Martin Bashir. …
Earlier this year, the BBC quietly edited an episode of Question Time after allegedly making a false claim about Net Zero. The corporation has defended the move, saying it is “normal practice to edit the programme before broadcast for audience clarity”.
Last year, a complaint was upheld when a BBC News article presented as fact the claim that “human-induced climate change made recent extreme heat in the US South-West, Mexico and Central America around 35 times more likely”.
In May 2022, Justin Rowlatt, the BBC’s Climate Editor, was found to have made misleading claims about extreme weather in a Panorama documentary.
In October 2020, Ofcom upheld a complaint by the National Farmers’ Union about the documentary Meat: A Threat to our Planet? and the documentary was later removed from BBC iPlayer.