CCNet
Editor: Benny Peiser Faculty
of Science, |
BSE, Climate Change and Science Journalism
David Whitehouse
22
May 2009
Dear Benny,
It is very interesting to see today’s story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD
“vCJD carrier risk overestimated.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8061697.stm
It is the latest in a long line of
similar assessments of the vCJD situation.
After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after
an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between
BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease
that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything
definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon
assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people
being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty
existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as
I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise
the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science
within BBC News at the time.
In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much
‘better’ story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So
whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with
the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at
least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers
afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as
some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on
our general approach to the story.
In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the
data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and
‘newsworthy,’ obscure what was actually happening, especially when those
possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a
computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a
point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly
promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said
computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was
the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible
reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with
editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist
should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way.
The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there
were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than
what they know.
My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely
criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story
correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total
number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far
smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the
scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards
science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical,
inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse
reporting on other scientific issues.
Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate
about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science
reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded
about climate change for many years and they have become at the very
least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a
public that doesn’t believe them anymore.
Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past
decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves
investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus
is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the
end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of
history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same.
David Whitehouse.