Climate at the BBC - an interview with Jon Fuller

Jon Fuller is an independent environmental campaigner who is deeply concerned about the climate crisis which the planet is facing. He is also worried that so many people seem to be unaware of the severity of the situation, and he holds the media and particularly the BBC partly to blame for this. After Ofcom became the official regulator for the BBC early last year, Jon's taken the BBC complaints procedure through its various stages, and he's now delivered a 14-page dossier, backed up by dozens of pages of documents, to Ofcom. He's asking them to investigate the BBC's coverage of climate issues over the period that they've been the official regulator and is hoping for a ruling with steps the BBC must take to improve. Ofcom has already admonished the BBC over an interview with Nigel Lawson broadcast by R4 Today in which various inaccuracies were aired without challenge. Mr Fuller cites various major climate-related summits, speeches, and declarations which the BBC gave little or no coverage to. He also questions the false balance where climate deniers are pitted against mainstream scientific views, but no time is given to the ever-growing number of highly regarded climate scientists who go much further in suggesting we're reaching tipping points and that runaway climate change may have already begun. He highlights too the total lack of economic scrutiny regarding the cost of climate change. This omission provides a heavy bias in favour of fossil fuel industries.

The interview took place at a small protest outside the BBC on Friday morning during which visitors to the BBC were leafletted. Several staff stopped and talked with the protesters including Head of News Fran Unsworth who angrily pointed to recent wide coverage of a UN report. But another news editor agreed that the BBC was not doing enough and told protesters that the BBC would not change until its own vast pension funds divested away from City of London and fossil fuel interests.

Jon's dossier was delivered to Ofcom on the 10th October - if you want to help you can write to them and support his call for a thorough investigation and ruling on the BBC.