Tag: BBC

A question of balance?

barryh3 Comments

1966

A group of us members of the university astronomical society visit Herstmonceaux Observatory in Sussex. We travel by coach from Cambridge. We have a great time, and on the way back consume significant quantities of Merrydown, which someone had the foresight to provision us with. One of the most entertaining of our party is an acquaintance, Brian Hoskins, of Trinity Hall. I will not embarrass Brian by saying what actually happened on this journey, but it was nothing disgraceful.

2014

I hear this vaguely familiar voice on BBC Radio 4’s morning Today Programme. It is distinguished Professor Brian Hoskins, chair of the Grantham Institute on climate change, voicing the urgency of the action needed against global warming and climate change. Next, I am horrified to hear the old political bruiser and ex-chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson pontificating about what nonsense is all this stuff about climate change. It is not a fair contest, the experienced media brawler versus the earnest scientist. Lawson was supposedly put up by the BBC in the interests of ‘balance’ – balancing true science against bigoted opinion.

2017-18

The BBC give Lawson an opportunity to further express his views on climate without scientific challenge. The next April, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom rules that “BBC Radio 4 broke accuracy rules by failing to sufficiently challenge the climate change denier Nigel Lawson’s controversial claims in an interview“.

2021, yesterday

The Meteorological Office reports on the Today programme that recent extreme weather events were undoubtedly caused by man-made climate change. No so-called ‘balancing viewpoints’ are expressed. The evidence is now fully in.

2022?

Interestingly, the other viewpoint commonly expressed by Lawson and other right-wing zealots around the same time was the importance of Brexit to sever the UK from the European Union. We don’t yet have the full evidence, but years of ill-tempered arguing, recent UK economic performance and the intractable situation in Northern Ireland suggest that the realisation, that this too was cloud cuckoo land, is not too far away now.

Message of BBC’s Blue Planet

barryh2 Comments
blue-planet-bbc-america
“We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about it. Surely we have a responsibility to care for our blue planet. The future of humanity, and indeed all life on Earth, now depends on us.”
David Attenborough, Blue Planet II

Salary Transparency

barryhLeave a comment

So the BBC has just published salaries of its presenters at the behest of the UK government. Was this sensible or political manoeuvring against the Beeb?

It is clearly political, in that only the salaries of direct employees are being reported. Those who choose to hide their financial affairs behind suitable ‘distribution companies’ avoid such scrutiny and pay less tax into the bargain. The logical response of valuable BBC employees is to turn themselves into companies, and thus regain their privacy and pay less tax. Joan Bakewell is right, the government is simply up to some mischief at the expense of the BBC.

I remember the culture of industry during my ‘working’ years. Salary was something negotiated with your boss on joining, and subsequently once a year. There was no simple way of knowing if you were paid in any way commensurate with your peers – you relied on the boss to do that. Of course, those who shouted loudest tended to get the best deal.

Far more sensible would be a company environment where all salaries and remunerations are transparently visible to all – clearly fair, but a culture change a long way from where things are (still) at. There is a peculiar attachment to secrecy in money matters – of course encouraged by the main beneficiaries. So there is a germ of sense in the government’s position, even though its motivation may have been entirely malicious.

Scotland and the Klan

barryhLeave a comment

Neil Oliver, with his gentle Scottish accent, has done some good programmes for BBC4, but none better than ‘Scotland and the Klan’, repeated last night. He follows the links between Scottish settlers in the Deep South of the USA and first slavery then the aftermath of the American Civil War – endemic racial prejudice and periodic resurgence of extreme groups, notably the Ku Klux Klan.Read More »

The Last Seabird Summer?

barryhLeave a comment

I awoke thinking about birds again. The BBC makes some excellent programmes on the natural world and the 2-episode BBC4 series The Last Seabird Summer? , finished last night, was no exception.

Presenter Adam Nicolson has spent much of his life on the Shiant Islands in the Minch between the Outer Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland, one of the most important bird places of Europe. First, Adam traced our long history of dependence on seabirds – puffins, guillemots and razorbills – thousands of years of collecting eggs and hunting the birds for meat, oil and feathers. More recently the emphasis has moved to conservation.

puffins
Puffins

But now there’s a crisis – in the last fifteen years, 40 per cent of Scotland’s sea birds have gone, graphically illustrated by relatively recent photographs of cliffs full of birds, but now empty. The Shiants are currently an exception, and the birds appear to have plenty of food. The excellent RSPB is helping for the future by exterminating rats from the islands (they arrived from shipwrecks) – rats eat eggs and young birds.

Adam travels to Iceland, home to over half the world’s puffins, to try and gain insight into what is going on. This is a story of two halves – to the north of Iceland, sea birds still prosper, puffins are still hunted and eaten – to the south, in the Westman islands, formerly prolific seabird colonies appear to be in terminal decline with no young birds. Crazily, some are still hunted and eaten for a few days a year, in the name of tradition.

After talking to ornithologists and marine scientists, Adam suggests that the root of the problem lies in the lack of suitable food for the birds. Kittiwakes are particularly vulnerable because they are essentially surface feeders. Puffins rely on sand eels, and where these are not present populations cannot survive.

Cyclic changes in the gulf stream and related water circulations in the atlantic appears to cause warmer then cooler water to appear around southern Iceland. With the warmer waters come huge populations of mackerel – good for fishermen, but these fish out-compete the birds for their food, so bird populations decline and then recover on a timescale of decades. This has happened since records began. However, global warming is increasing the baseline sea temperature. The result appears to be more severe decline in bird populations. The worry is that they may be driven beyond the point of no return. The Icelandic hunters are not helping.

It seems that, as global warming progresses, we must live with the spectre raised by these programmes of The Last Seabird Summer, in southern Iceland and a lot of Scotland at least – and notably for the iconic puffin.

But, as ever, there will be winners as well as losers. As Adam points out, some seabird populations, such as the gannet, which is very flexible in its food needs, are thriving – for example the huge colony on Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth – and may well continue to do so.

Do watch these programmes, available for another three weeks if you have access to BBC catchup. But you’ll have to not be squeamish about watching puffins caught, cooked and eaten.

Puffin picture courtesy of Hanno and Wikimedia Commons