stacked ABC board forces network to show documentary promoting idiotic non-science

You may or may not recall that over the last few years, the federal government has carefully stacked the ABC’s board with right wing nutcases, including Keith “we never did nuffink to the Aborigines, it was like that when we got here” Windschuttle and Janet “Islam promotes rape” Albrechtsen. The ABC later dropped a biography of conservative radio hack Alan Jones over “legal fears”.

Now comes the not-so-excellent news that the ABC is – against the advice of its science reporter and as a result of pressure from the board on the director of television – showing a ‘controversial’ (some might say, ‘moronic’) documentary which claims that global warming is a lie and the Earth is actually getting hotter because (obviously) the sun is getting hotter. This is a theory which has not attracted much support from, you know, scientists familiar with the sun and the Earth’s climate, but what would they know? And of course if it’s the sun, and not greenhouse gases produced by human activity, then that means that it’s ok for us to do nothing: we can keep digging up and burning everything we can get our opposable digits on, and even if we burn to a crisp as the temperature rises we can keep ourselves cool with calming thoughts that we’re not to blame, it’s the sun (or perhaps adopt Monty Burns’ philosophy that “since the dawn of time man has longed to destroy the sun” and launch the ‘War on Solar’).

This episode showcases one of the most dangerous aspects of public dialogue in the early 21st century in action: the notion that every view, no matter how extreme or ideologically derived, is a ‘valid’ perspective, and that radical and largely dismissed pseudo-science should be given broad exposure and coverage because it represents part of a ‘debate.’ In this instance the only debate was between the journalists, trained in science and accustomed to making such decisions based on the content of programs, who decided the program was scientifically unmeritorious, and the stacked right-wing board of directors who put pressure on management to show the documentary anyway.

In other words, rationality and objectivity versus ideology and politics. No surprises which one wins out when three out of eight directors are far-right wing Government appointees and the others are from a ‘diverse’ (aka business) background. Of course it is completely irrelevant that global warming is perceived as an issue of great concern in the electorate, and that the Government which appointed the relevant board members is regarded as much worse than the Opposition at handling that particular issue…

Update: today’s Crikey points to this snippet in The Australian, which mentions that a far right political group covertly provided copies of the documentary to science journalists at a conference in Melbourne, and also gives us Tim Flannery’s thoughts:

Science journalist Robyn Williams asked eminent scientist (and Australian of the Year) Tim Flannery at the fifth World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne yesterday whether the ABC should screen the doco. That would depend, Flannery replied, on whether it was labelled as science, fiction or a piece of entertainment.