CJR Observatory: At BBC, the bosses gonna be eyeballing the science staff, seeking “impartiality, accuracy”
One has to feel for the science reporters at BBC who, in The Tracker’s general impression, are doing classy work for a classy outfit. Imperfect, of course, but they no doubt have enough problems getting their stuff past editors. Now comes the prospect of a whole new layer of scrutiny from the BBC Trust to be sure they don’t tilt the field overmuch while reporting on GMOs, climate change, vaccine science v. vaccine daftness, and other such publicly contentious matters.
Recommended reading at Columbia Journalism Review’s Observatory blogsite is Curtis Brainard‘s report (with assistance from Cris Russell) on events behind a new Beeb science policy, including links to yet more. It includes some barbed remarks from one of the (unnamed), embattled BBC journalists. The piece in addition gets into a recent ruckus over the quality of the UK’s science press corps at large. While there is, as viewed from here, a bit much over there of sensation-grabbing in headlines and lead paragraphs (not to mention some reporters’ fixations on boffinry) the underlying grasp of most of the news as revealed by the material deeper in stories tends toward the quite high mark. This certainly goes for BBC’s coverage.
See Also: PressGazette – Oliver Luft: BBC Trust to review corporation’s science coverage ; Some extra context here. The Trust has done similar to other beats as well.
- Charlie Petit
