BBC switches off climate special

The BBC has scrapped plans for Planet Relief, a TV special on climate change, according to a report — BBC switches off climate special — on the BBC news website.

The show would have involved viewers in a mass “switch-off” to save energy.

The reason was that the corporation’s executives were worried about accusations of bias from global warming skeptics. Not having seen the program I’m not in a position to say whether the program was in fact biased or “too campaigning” as senior editors had feared. But then again, not even the editors had seen the program. In fact the program has not even been made.

It wasn’t the program itself that was seen as being potentially biased, but the “program concept.” That’s interesting, and to my mind fairly ludicrous. If it’s “biased” to have a program that says that climate change is a real threat and advocating saving energy, then presumably it would also be biased to have a program arguing that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s hyped and we don’t need to do anything about it. It would presumably therefore be biased to say that any program that takes any position at all is out of bounds. In other words, goodbye documentary programming.

I think this is a sign of just how strong the reach of the global warming skeptics has become. Although they have little convincing evidence that global warming isn’t happening they can still create a climate of fear where it’s considered biased to recognize what the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists believe — that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth’s land, atmosphere, and oceans.

It’s also a reflection of how cowed the BBC currently is, following episodes where BBC employees faked phone-in competitions and a TV production company making a program for BBC One showed scenes out of order, making it look like the Queen had stormed out of a photo shoot. Because the BBC is still reeling from these scandals it’s very vulnerable to accusations of impropriety. If the BBC had kept its act clean in the past the Planet Relief program might well be going ahead. The current situation to me seems to be hyper-correction. Because of past mistakes, the BBC is now making yet more mistakes by second-guessing itself.

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