Unbiased doesn't mean equal time
Jeremy Paxman's recent article in the BBC house magazine Ariel, republished (presumably) here, seems to have stirred up a lot of fuss for all the wrong reasons. Well yes, of course, Paxman is entirely right to bemoan the fact that while the BBC covers climate change and presents the view that it is anthropogenic (ie "human-made", the climate scientists' term for "we're responsible"), it isn't very green itself.
But because the BBC airs the view that climate change is anthropogenic doesn't mean that it's biased on the topic, as some people (on the Right, of course) have tried to suggest.
Being unbiased means that you determine the proportion of time (or whatever) you devote to each side of a story on the basis of the proportion of well-informed people in the field who hold that view. It doesn't mean that you give equal time to every crackpot opinion around.
So take climate change. The IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consists of around 2,000 leading climate scientists from around the world. They may disagree about a few smaller things, like what the best-case likely sea-level rise is going to be by the end of the century - is it 60cm or 80 - but in general they are 100% of the view that climate change is the result of human generation of greenhouse gases.
Almost no reputable climate scientists believe that this is all happening naturally. In fact virtually the only "scientists" you'll find who don't agree it's anthropogenic are funded by the fossil fuel industry - and before they got into climate, they were employed by the tobacco companies to demonstrate that cigarette smoking was not as bad for you as real scientists said.
So if you - as News 24 did the other day when the IPCC report came out - have a three-way interview with a sensible climate scientist from the University of East Anglia (one of the world's leading centres for the study of the subject) , and a loony from a petroleum-fuelled American "institute", you are not being unbiased by giving the two of them equal time in an interview. You are, in fact, being biased heavily in favour of the "we don't know enough so let's not do anything" fossil-fuel lobby.
The media lobbying tactic that has been developed, particularly in the States, over the last several years, is to set up a vociferous group promoting a view on the topic and seeking equal time for their side of the story as for the others - irrespective of its merit. If they succeed in getting equal time, then they have won, and have succeeded in biasing the media.
Thus there is a group that would have you believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago - that's basically rather later than the dog was domesticated in the real world - that all those fossils were put there by God to fool palaeontologists, and the Grand Canyon was the result of the Great Flood (as in Noah, etc). There is absolutely no evidence for this view, and scientific opinion is squarely of the view that hundreds of billions of years have elapsed since the Universe came into being and that there is no way in which it happened the geological equivalent of last week. The lobbyists have largely succeeded, in the US, in ensuring that their view gets equal time with more sensible scientific and provable explanations - for example getting signs put up to this effect at the Grand Canyon and selling their books in its bookstores - thus resulting in bias, because very few people who know anything about the evidence actually believe the world was created in 4004BC.
Then there is the example of bias that is more common in British broadcasting: the religious pundit. Whenever something happens that might call into question some aspect of public morality or behaviour, a religious person (usually male) of suitably high rank - such as the Archbishop of Canterbury - is trotted out to comment on it, despite the fact that there are others (social scientists, doctors, psychologists and social workers for example) who surely know a great deal more about the subject. Because as anyone can see for themselves, our morality is not in any sense determined by religion of any kind. In fact looking at the histories of the major religions, rather the opposite would seem to be the case. Instead society works the other way around: it picks bits of the religions that match the current morality and conveniently forgets about the bits that don't.
Religious personages have a level of privilege to express their views that no other section of society has, and now we are in a multicultural society, of course that means more religions instead of just one or two. But when do atheists get a turn on Thought for the Day, for example? There is simply nothing else like that programme on the air - no other group of people who have a guaranteed media pulpit, day in and day out. That is also media bias - it isn't even equal time.
Given the fact that there is no proof that any religion is actually "true" - or if you prefer, there is equal proof in favour of all religions (ie no proof at all), should adherents of the Church of the Spaghetti Monster get 'equal time' on air with believers of other religions? Or do we say that as only 35% or so of British residents express a religious preference at all, then the non-religious should get the majority (I was going to say "the lion's share", but that might be construed as being a bit non-PC) of the airtime on Thought for the Day?
These are questions we can all no doubt answer for ourselves. Just bear in mind that equal time for unequal points of view is equivalent to bias, not its antithesis.
