BBC Reducing Scientific "False Balance"

Occasionally in political discussions someone will suggest that we should bring back the "fairness doctrine" for American news programs that was eliminated by the FCC in 1987. Usually the idea is that a return to said doctrine would lead to more balanced news coverage, but the problem there is that news programs do it anyway, sometimes with ridiculous results. The problem with trying to present "balance" is that these days it's pretty easy to find somebody who represents "the other side" on just about any issue, whether or not they're even remotely qualified to comment on the subject.

The BBC is now moving to reduce this sort of "false balance" in science coverage, in which unqualified individuals are given airtime to discuss views contrary to established scientific conclusions. While this is a broad brush that will likely reduce the coverage of fringe subjects such as paranormal phenomena, it's also true that said phenomena are paranormal precisely because they haven't been verified by formal science. Also, most of the "experts" who get airtime on those subjects are people like media psychics who don't have much to say about it anyway aside from self-promotion.

The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation’s science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues. The report found that there was still an ‘over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality’ which sought to give the ‘other side’ of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.

Some 200 staff have already attended seminars and workshops and more will be invited on courses in the coming months to stop them giving ‘undue attention to marginal opinion.’ “The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences,” wrote the report authors.

“Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given.”

Cultivating "balance" for its own sake is not helpful from the standpoint of scientific inquiry, and can do a lot more harm than whatever good producers hope to achieve. In the United States, for example, it's already becoming clear that promoting the views of anti-vaccine activists is leading to fewer vaccinated children and a return of diseases that we thought were taken care of years ago. The debate over climate change is another area where it's becoming more and more difficult to find qualified scientists who dispute that the Earth is getting warmer, leaving few people besides unqualified political activists to provide "balance."

I'm strongly opposed to censorship, so hopefully that's not what this turns into. Every so often a "marginal view" does turn out to be right, but it seems reasonable to me that we need to wait and see if such views hold up to scientific scrutiny before we present them as science, which by definition always trails behind the cutting edge of observations and hypotheses. It would also be useful if people understood scientific terminology better. Creationists who describe evolution as "just a theory" because they think "theory" and "guess" mean the same thing are a real pet peeve of mine.

It's all the more important to be clear on the science because people tend to favor their political and religious beliefs over scientific knowledge.

Belief appears trumps fact and reason, which is why dealing with anti-vaxxers, creationists, or climate change deniers can be such a rage-inducing experience. This news is also a bit disheartening, as changing minds is not as easy as explaining the facts. What can we do to combat the fact that scientifically-literate individuals are turning their backs on facts in order to toe the line for political party or religious sect?

This is why "false balance" that merely introduces uncertainty into scientific debate works so well. People accept the position they agree with as true, with no regard to the qualifications of the individual adopting it. While this survey shows that this tendency is likely inevitable, it seems to me that news media outlets should do their part to limit it as best they can.