Dear all,

 

Rather than send this round the whole MECCSA list I thought I’d limit it to the policy group, in the first instance.

 

We may have different views on the EU issue, but I’d be surprised if we’re not all extremely worried about the future funding of our work, and indeed of our institutions. I therefore listened to the report on the Today programme following Thought for the Day with a growing sense of disbelief and then outrage. The programme is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hhvxv#play, and the item is just after 7.50. I complained to [log in to unmask], but got an automatic response saying complaints should be addressed to [log in to unmask] but this repeatedly comes back as undeliverable. Absolutely unbelievable!   Anyway, I’ve pasted in the complaint below. If anyone wants the chapter mentioned in my complaint, I’ll send it to them personally, as MECCSA e-mails don’t take attachments. I’ve alerted Roy Greenslade, who’s writing about this, and will send round the link once the piece is up.

 

Best, Julian.  

 

 

I am writing to complain in the strongest possible terms about the manner in which Professor Angus Dalgleish was included on the Today programme this morning. There are two separate issues here.

The first concerns ‘balance’.

In recent weeks the BBC has been repeatedly criticised for the manner in which it has ‘balanced’ well-informed views from the Remain side in the Referendum debate with, increasingly as the campaign wore on, knee-jerk dismissals of those views from the Brexit side. Critics of this practice  have included Timothy Garton-Ash, Roy Greenslade (who I have alerted to this latest incident), and, yesterday, at the launch of the Report of the Commission on Public Service Broadcasting in the 21^st  Century (of whose advisory board I am a member), Lord Puttnam (who was on your programme yesterday morning). On this point, this is worth reading: (https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-eu-referendum-and-media.html ).  I have written widely about broadcasting impartiality, and, as it is highly relevant to both the Referendum coverage and this morning’s incident, I’ve attached a chapter which I wrote for the recent collection Is the BBC in Crisis?, edited by John Mair, Richard Tait and Richard Lance Keeble. As I point out in the chapter,   in response to Professor Steve Jones’ assessment of the accuracy and impartiality of BBC science coverage, the BBC Trust agreed that ‘programme makers must make a distinction between well-established fact and opinion in science coverage and ensure the distinction is clear to the audience’ and that ‘there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence’. Or as Jones himself put it: ‘Equality of voice calls for a match of scientists not with politicians or activists, but with those qualified to take a knowledgeable, albeit perhaps divergent, view of research. Attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims interest can make for false balance: to free publicity to marginal opinions and not to impartiality, but its opposite’. I simply cannot understand why this principle has not been accepted when it comes to coverage of other crucial matters. Are critics of how the BBC interprets its impartiality requirements really going to have to fight this out laboriously on an issue by issue basis?

The second concerns the bona fides of Professor Dalgleish as an acceptable interviewee on this programme.

During the referendum campaign you must have searched very long and hard to come up with economists who supported Brexit, since there are precious few of them. In the end, of course, you fell back repeatedly on the Thatcherite stalwart Professor Minford, whose views are almost entirely marginal and widely discredited, as Professor Simon Wren Lewis has repeatedly pointed out in his Mainly Macro blog (here, for example: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/more-on-brexit-and-politicisation-of.html). But you must have searched especially long and hard to find anyone at all in the academic/scientific community who thinks that Brexit will be anything other than catastrophic in funding terms – I know literally no-one, from vice-chancellors to administrative staff, who thinks otherwise. So, the first question is: why did you think it necessary to seek out someone with utterly marginal, eccentric and unrepresentative views to ‘balance’ the highly authoritative Sir Paul Nurse (quoted) and Dame Anne Glover (interviewed)? But the second question is: why did you not inform the listeners  that Dalgleish was the UKIP candidate for Sutton and Cheam at the last election (http://www.ukipsutton.org/index.php?page=angus-dangleish). I wonder how Professor Glover felt about her interview enabling this man to hold forth to a large audience, without his political affiliations (which are highly relevant in this instance) being revealed to that audience, and indeed I’ve e-mailed her to ask her whether you informed her prior to the interview of this man’s political affiliations.

I look forward to receiving a considered reply as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Julian Petley