Background: Shown on BBC, Panorama bills itself as “The Worlds Longest Running Investigative TV Show.” It has a history of “investigating” current affairs issues and is, generally, fairly watchable. Like all “Investigative” shows, it likes to hype things up and often crosses the line about what is acceptable.
Despite this almost regular massage of the truth, lots of people take everything it says as gospel. In local debates, claims made on Panorama are often repeated while people demand their local authorities to take action.
A few months ago (May) there was an example of this, when Panorama showed an investigation into the “dangers” of WiFi. As with most of these things, it was utter nonsense. A few talking head scientists were trotted out for their 15 minutes of fame on the basis that they were willing to imply WiFi signals would make you grow ears on your forehead (or something equally stupid).
Although the program was crap, it fuelled a significant amount of debate both at the national and local level. People are still demanding WiFi connections be removed from schools, electro-sensitivity gets regular mentions in the press (and in BadScience…) and so on.
So, it was somewhat pleasing today to hear that: (From BBC News)
The BBC has upheld complaints against an edition of the current affairs programme Panorama.
It is a bit more watered down than I would have liked, basically it is just admitting that Panorama were very selective in the talking heads they went for and failed to properly represent the scientific opinion.
On Friday, the ECU [Editorial Complaints Unit] said it had been “legitimate” for Panorama to examine concerns about wi-fi raised by chairman of the Health Protection Agency Sir William Stewart.
But it said the programme included only one contributor, Prof Repacholi, who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers who supported him.
“This gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue,” the ECU said.
“In addition, Prof Repacholi’s contribution was presented in a context which suggested to viewers that his scientific independence was in question, whereas the other scientists were presented uncritically.
So, not quite the resounding criticism I wanted, but a start.
The depressing part of this is that nothing will change and the damage has been done. Panorama has quite high viewing figures, the episode is out and available for the terminally insane to reinforce their nonsense with and, basically, an apology hidden in BBC News does nothing to reverse that. It seems the BBC has decided to respond to this upheld complaint by:
Panorama said it was now planning a meeting to explore issues of balance and fair dealing with contributors in relation to scientific and medical topics.
Blah, blah. Meaningless weasel words. Nothing will change. No one will be told off. But they will waste a few hours drinking coffee as they “explore” a concept they seem completely ignorant of. What a waste of the taxpayers money.