The Times was entitled to say in a leader column that the BBC produced “no coverage” of an intervention by Bill Gates on climate change despite it being discussed on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, press regulator IPSO has found.
During the week of 3 November, the story was discussed for several minutes on the Today programme, for around seven minutes on BBC Radio Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and for two minutes on a BBC World Service Newshour segment.
The Times had used it as an example of what the BBC chooses not to cover in a critical leader column the following week.
It said that “one of the BBC’s biggest problems is not just what it covers, but what it chooses not to cover. For example, there was no coverage of Bill Gates’s rethink on climate change last week – a significant intervention from one of the world’s richest men – presumably because it did not fit with a metropolitan world view.”
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a UK non-profit group aiming to support informed debate on energy issues, opposed this framing, complaining to IPSO that there had been coverage.
The Times argued the short segments that had been aired were negligible, that the Today programme had noted the story only in passing, and that the BBC had historically covered Gates’s views on climate change more extensively.
IPSO agreed that the topic had “received comparatively little coverage compared to Mr Gates’ previous views on the topic of climate change, and appeared to have been referenced only on radio programmes primarily focused on other topics”.
It said The Times was entitled to take a view about the scale of coverage in an opinion-based leader column.
The ECIU then asked Yougov to conduct polling to test readers’ interpretation of what The Times had written.
Some 2,056 people were asked: “Imagine you saw the following statement in a newspaper column: “For example, there was no coverage of Bill Gates’s rethink on climate change last week.” Which of the following best represents your understanding of the sentence?”
Just over two-thirds (68%) said they would think there had been no coverage, 11% said they would think “there was some coverage of Bill Gates’s rethink, but no full news pieces” and 21% did not know.
The ECIU submitted this polling to IPSO and asked for a review of the investigation but the regulator said no flaws in the process had been found. Read the full IPSO ruling here.
The ECIU had more success with polling earlier this year, forcing IPSO to rethink its decision to reject a complaint against the Daily Mail in relation to the average prices of petrol versus electric cars.
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