Editorial: February 2005
By Richard G Elen
Februrary 2005
Hi, and welcome to February's new additions to EMC.
Some philosophical content this month, including a look at modern British television that would no doubt make Adam Smith proud – privatise, damn your eyes, damn your eyes; why the Television Act of 1954 actually didn’t create ITV; and a look at British religious television from the days of the Epilogue to the present. Also looking back a bit, there’s also a piece on the lost aspects of Seventies broadcasting – from the National Anthem to ‘VHF’ (as opposed to ‘FM’) – and a chance to experience what it was like to buy and watch your first television set, back in 1950. We hope you enjoy them.
Meanwhile it’s interesting that the question of television bias is coming back into the news, with a recent BBC report suggesting that the Corporation might inadvertently being a bit too biased towards the EU. We’ll be looking at the whole topic of media bias in a future issue, but it’s worth noting that presenting an unbiased picture on a particular topic is not at all easy. It’s not just a matter of equal time, for example. Let’s say you are doing a story on an aspect of global climate change (what we used to call ‘global warming’ - we don’t call it that any more, because with more energy in the weather system you’re likely to have more extremes, which are as likely to be gales or blizzards asheatwaves). Do you give equal time to (a) the people who tell you that climate change is real and it’s happening now, and (b) to those who maintain that either it’s not happening or it’s natural warming and nothing to do with us? No, you don’t. Virtually the only people who believe the latter are employed by the fossil fuel industry and even they are hard to find. Giving what is now itself a biased, fringe view of climate change an equal hearing with committed, objective researchers is like giving Creationism equal time with modern evolutionary science – it unfairly biases you away from a sensible,m scientific ‘reality-based’ view of the world. But where do you draw the line when it comes to something like the EU? If you discover that people by and large don’t understand what the EU is and does, and you decide to produce a documentary about the EU to explain it all, will that be seen as propaganda?
