Britain does not have a real equivalent to the US first amendment, so the fringe crowd (AGW deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc) will not get equal time up against scientists and experts (not that American media would be restricted from such selectivity). They may get some air, but they will be, I guess, kind of disrespected.
On the face of it, this seems like a positive. For the most part these days, the fringeys and outliers are basically out lying. But is there any troubling potential for abuse here?
I don’t think it’s a First Amendment issue that gets anti-vaxxers and similar loons on American television, but an ill-considered notion that issues have to be presented with “balance”, even where none exists. The Beeb has clearly grapsed this. The American news networks have not.
Well said.
Not unless there is something subjective or ambiguous about the difference between credible science and the lunatic fringe. In my experience there is not. This isn’t like politics where media bias might be problematic; in reporting science, a bias toward factual accuracy is not only desirable but absolutely essential, and failing to do so is nothing but trash journalism and a public disservice.
The “balance” that popular commercial media usually provide in scientific discussions thought to be “controversial” like climate change is usually some lunatic who is a known serial liar and most of whose publications are his/her own blog. It’s not hard to tell a published and reputable scientist from a quack but sometimes commercial media act like they can’t tell, or are irresponsibly promoting sensationalist fake controversy, maybe in some cases in deference to the interests of certain advertisers. The BBC doesn’t have that problem.
I don’t think so. They think of themselves as “the news service of record,” have way too many services in too many languages they don’t want to mess up, and are generally too boring to want a Nancy Grace or Art Bell.
Well, plus (I guess) the assumption that argument is more interesting than explanation. They could have a solo interview with Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson to calmly give an intro to global warming or evolution or whatever but the SHOUTING means the ISSUE is CONTROVERSIAL AND EXCITING, ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?!?!?!
Bums in seats, laddies. American tv news shows have realized that they get more viewers if they have a lot of people shouting than they do with sober old farts having reasonable conversations. Doesn’t matter what they’re shouting about. What matters is that viewers tune in and their advertising ratings go up. It’s a sad state of affairs but it’s not really new. “If it bleeds, it leads”, right?
Thank heavens somebody is willing to buck the tradition.
I don’t think that’s true in the slightest. The difference is that the BBC is supported by taxation. American news is privately run and depends on popular appeal.
The majority of the population would rather feel educated and left to believe nonsense than be educated and disagree with reality.
[Little bit of a hijack]
I’m not too sanguine 
about that behavior of showing disaster first (not sure how that “If it bleeds, it leads” is applicable here as it is more like “let us see you and him fight”). Back in my college years I worked at a local college media class/news cast, one time we made a nice very uplifting and happy bit of news about a family that had been down on their luck but was getting much better, we had next a bit about a gruesome murder in the neighborhood next.
It was then clear that there are more reasons why “If it bleeds, it leads”, there is also the point that was made clear to me and many other students then, there is a more prosaic reason: you leave the uplifting stuff for the end so as to leave the viewers with hope in the final minutes and not just despair.
[/lboah]
Anyhow, kudos for the BBC, IIUC Wikipedia and Reddit in their science sections have been doing the same already for years.
What has been going on in places like FOX news is like if astrologers were allowed to reply to what astronomers are saying in interviews.
Let’s face it, the most important attribute of a news organization is that it be trustworthy, and trustworthiness implies both competence and integrity. That’s what’s important. That’s the strength of public broadcasters like the BBC, and the CBC in Canada. PBS, sadly, is hamstrung by reliance on voluntary funding, much of it corporate, and has lately been inordinately infiltrated by Koch money.
Framing a settled scientific issue as a “controversy” and giving airtime to some random lunatic doesn’t advance the public interest, it undermines it. The measure of a news organization is how well and reliably it reports the facts, not its ability to get loudmouths to shout at each other. One of the most annoying and disingenuous aspects of truly bad news organizations like Fox News is promulgating the myth that ALL issues, including complex scientific ones, can be no better served than to frame them as controversies, provide both “sides” in an awesome display of “balance”, and then supposedly the slack-jawed troglodytes that make up most of their viewers can make up their own minds on questions like whether, say, God created the earth 6000 years ago or whether climate change is a hoax. Although it must be said that most of the time Fox only provides one side, invariably the one that’s wrong. 
I think you are right. I haven’t heard a lot of nutters on NPR, which is closest to the BBC in not caring quite as much about ratings.
However, if you accused a news director of playing for ratings, I bet she would deny it. Perhaps the excuse is that they are not qualified to distinguish between the mainstream and the extreme?
You reminded me of the scandal that PBS had by giving time to one of the biggest mis-informers, Anthony Watts.
The main challenge the BBC has is to make science programs that are interesting.
While they don’t have to take into account the views of sponsors and God botherers peddling their bizarre theories, the BBC does have an issue with getting the balance right in its documentaries.
If I see one more clip of the observatories on a mountain in the Atacama desert taken with time lapse cameras so that the huge antennae dishes perkily scan back and forth across the sky really fast…I will just switch off. The huge sweeps of the night sky…this is just eye candy for HD TVs.
Lately they have started to roll out ‘professors with personality’ fronting these programmes. They seem so dumbed down and politically correct. The message is that a young woman can have a career in science and go lots of exciting holidays doing research. There she is at the North Pole. Oh next diving in the same trench in the Red Sea as all the other programmes checking whether the tectonic plates are still moving. Then off to a volcano and then…the lab coat and microscopes. Then some more sweeping ariel shots: the city at night - must be about electricity…And the music! How much must the xylophone player be earning? Every time there is wistful sequence - he does his plink plonk routine.
The programs seems to be made for the average 10 year old and laden with so many distracting visual cliches. Important points are slow to be made and desperately laboured.
Lack of orginality and the assumption that the audience has to be kept constantly bombarded by extravagant visuals are holding back science broadcasting. Patting themselves on the back for fending off loony tunes, when that is not an issue…That sounds like the typical sort of narcissistic hubris that pervades the BBC.
:smack:
Well, there’s no First Amendment issue with what American broadcasters choose to air, so the reference to such in the OP deserved to be challenged. I don’t know if the BBC’s depends on government funding affects its programming choices; I thought their independence was a point of pride.
Anyway, I’ve no problem viewing this as a pure (if unfortunate) business decision.
No, you are correct. If anything, it kind of works in the opposite direction, freedom of the press and all that. I just got kind of turned around by the theme of a long pit thread.
Business is entirely in control of the US media, that is why it is so terribly “left-wing”. :dubious: But I am not quite sure why you seem to think BBC is making an “unfortunate” decision. Was that what you meant?
True, but market forces will raise the news director who is a bit of a nutter himself or who thinks that it’s not fair to not show all sides to the top.
The American media doesn’t strike me personally as especially left-wing. Granted it’s a relative term and MSNBC is certainly more left-ish than Fox News, but I wouldn’t generalize.
I was unclear - the “unfortunate” decision was on the part of American news channels to pander to loons and shills, ostensibly in the name of presenting “balance”. I have no specific comments to make about the BBC.
You’re both right. As I said earlier, “It’s not hard to tell a published and reputable scientist from a quack but sometimes commercial media act like they can’t tell, or are irresponsibly promoting sensationalist fake controversy, maybe in some cases in deference to the interests of certain advertisers. The BBC doesn’t have that problem.”
American media aren’t necessarily ignorant, but in the interests of profitability and their advertisers they often have to act as if they are.
Having a bunch of scientists explain global warming seems too much like school. Americans are too cool for school.
Put a boring scientist with facts up against a loudmouth with a pretty face and blonde hair and now it seems like a compeitition, like football. We love football (the real kind where you don’t fake being injured). ANYTHING can happen!!! OOOHHH I wonder what will happen next. Maybe we can tie Benghazi and Lois Lerner to the global warming debate.
It sounds like you have knack for this format. You should go into producing science programs.
What’s wrong with having actual working scientists present science shows, even gasp actual working women scientists? Alice Roberts, Helen Czerski, Jim Al-Khalili and Brian Cox all make good and informative programmes in what is after all a visual medium.