There’s an interesting post on the BBC’s ‘The Editors’ blog today on how the BBC, as a media organisation, should deal with communicating climate change and, in particular, how it should represent “climate sceptics”.

The publicly funded corporation came under fire in September when it cancelled plans to air a Comic-relief style show aimed at raising public awareness of global warming amid concerns that it would breach the corporation’s guidelines on impartiality.

The blog post by Steve Herrmann briefly describes the efforts of Richard Black, the BBC’s online environment correspondent, to better understand what “climate sceptics” think and the arguments they use to try to debunk anthropogenic global warming.

It includes a more detailed piece written by Black and Roger Harrabin, BBC News’ environmental analyst, for their in-house magazine Ariel, outlining their views on what the BBC must do to “get it right on climate”.

Black and Harrabin write:

Given the weight of opinion building up around the IPCC it makes sense for us to focus our coverage on the consensus that climate change is happening, is serious, but is manageable if tackled urgently.

We do not need consistently to ‘balance’ the reports of the IPCC. When we broadcast outlying views we should make sure we do not over represent them and we should keep a rough balance of views from either side of the IPCC. If we do not, we will distort the issue and risk misleading or confusing our audience.

We must also be more savvy about the way we treat outlying views – and we should make it clear to our audience when an interviewee holds a minority position.

They also say that vociferous views expressed on blogs etc need to be interpreted with caution…it’s worth a read.

Olive Heffernan