22 July 2008Michael Le Page
Don't believe anything you see in a TV documentary made in the UK.
Documentary makers here have no obligation to be accurate, though factual programmes should present a wide range of views.
That is the implication of a series of rulings by Ofcom, the regulatory body for responsible for upholding broadcast standards in the UK, on complaints made about a British TV documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Channel 4, the television company that commissioned and broadcast the documentary, first shown on 8 March last year, subsequently sold the show to 21 countries and released it on DVD. Numerous clips have been viewed on video-sharing site YouTube.
According to the Ofcom ruling, while all programmes dealing with important issues should be impartial, only news programmes have to be presented with "due accuracy". It doesn't matter if other programmes are misleading as long as they don't cause "harm or offence", and the regulator's interpretation of harm is so narrow that it effectively gives broadcasters a green light to mislead the public.
The "documentary" in question attacked the idea that global warming is caused by human activity.
To achieve this, writer and director Martin Durkin didn't look at the many genuine questions and uncertainties relating to climate change. Instead, he assembled a one-sided package of misrepresentations and fabrications based mainly on inaccurate newspaper reports, opinion pieces and old propaganda disseminated by the oil lobby and its stooges.
Blatant errors
For instance, parts of some of the graphs were actually made up, as the programme makers effectively admitted when they corrected the most blatant errors for later broadcasts.
For me and my colleagues, this shameful piece of television was the final straw that persuaded us to do a special setting out the science behind the many climate myths and misconceptions.
We were not the only ones outraged. Durkin's documentary also prompted many complaints to Ofcom. Dave Rado, a concerned layman, worked with scientists to produce one detailed complaint claiming 137 breaches of the UK's broadcasting regulations. Those involved stress that they are not trying to stifle free speech, but rather to prevent the media from practicing "systematic deception".
Now, more than a year after the broadcast, Ofcom has finally gotten around to ruling on these complaints (pdf). It has upheld some of the claimed breaches.
Upheld complaints
The programme misrepresented the views of David King, then the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, and gave him no opportunity to respond, Ofcom has decided. The programme criticised King for comments he did not make.
Ofcom also partly upheld similar complaints by oceanographer Carl Wunsch and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Channel 4 will have to broadcast summaries of Ofcom's ruling in each of the three cases.
So much for fairness. What about the general issue of factual accuracy? According to Ofcom's broadcasting code: "Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the public".
The code goes on to say that "due impartiality must be preserved on ... major matters relating to current public policy" and "in dealing with matters, an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight".
Ofcom has ruled that the final part of the programme was in breach of the code relating to impartiality and presenting a wide range of views.
The decision is fairly meaningless, however, as it has not imposed any sanction. Channel 4 will not have to broadcast anything relating to this ruling.
Factual failings
What seems extraordinary, though, is that Ofcom has decided Durkin's programme was not in breach of the code when it comes to factual accuracy. So apparently:
• It's OK to fabricate graphics.
• It's OK to state that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans when in fact humans emit far more.
• It's OK to present scientists as experts in fields they in fact know little about.
• It's OK to present disputed claims as if they were well-established and accepted scientific facts.
• It's OK to claim: "There is no evidence at all from Earth's long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperatures", when there is overwhelming evidence going back many decades that CO2 does play a role.
• It's OK to deliberately confuse long-term changes in sea ice cover with the seasonal coming and going of ice.
• It's OK to state that Margaret Thatcher made a speech to scientists at the Royal Society saying: "There's money on the table for you to prove this stuff" (meaning global warming) when she did not say any such thing. The extraordinary idea being that climate change was an issue cooked up by climate scientists in order to get funding.
• It's OK to state that, "The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is at odds with much of the available scientific data: data from weather balloons and satellites, from ice core surveys, and from the historical temperature records" when this is clearly untrue.
• It's OK to claim that an individual called Piers Corbyn produces more accurate weather forecasts than the UK's Met Office when there is no evidence of this at all.
The list could go on and on, but you get the picture. I can't think of any supposedly factual programme on British TV that was less accurate than Durkin's polemic. For Ofcom to rule that it was not factually misleading is extraordinary and sets a disastrous precedent for programmes relating to controversial scientific issues.
'Harm and offence'
The reasoning behind this decision, according to the judgement, is that for non-news programmes the rule on factual accuracy applies only to "content which materially misleads the audience so as to cause harm and offence". It goes on to say that only "actual harm" rather than "potential harm" matters.
In other words, discouraging action to avoid future catastrophes does not count as harm.
On this basis, Ofcom decided that all the falsehoods in the programme relating to the causes of climate change could simply be ignored. The programme will not cause harm by affecting people's behaviour, the judgement claims, because most viewers know the views expressed are not the scientific consensus.
Well, yes, most viewers might know what the consensus is, but an awful lot of them do not accept it. What's more, most viewers would not have been aware how many of the statements in the programme were false.
Poor record
By Ofcom's logic, a programme that presented the long-discredited myths about AIDS not being caused by HIV as being true would not count as causing harm either. Indeed, astonishingly, the ruling makes exactly this comparison.
As for the factual inaccuracies not causing offence, well, I get hopping mad when I see a pack of lies presented as the truth. Does that kind of offence not count? Clearly not.
The other thing I find extraordinary about this case is that Channel 4 is a publicly owned company. Despite its public remit, it has a record of broadcasting similar nonsense.
What's more, with its advertising revenues falling, it is currently campaigning to get its hands on part of the BBC's licence fees. What a horrifying prospect.
In my opinion, if Channel 4 carries on producing programmes like The Great Global Warming Swindle, the sooner it goes bust the better off Britain and the world will be.
