The resignation of a pair of British Broadcasting Corporation executives over the manipulative editing of a video of President Donald Trump to suggest he incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is not the end of the BBC’s troubles. The Beeb has launched a probe to determine if its climate change coverage has been slanted. If the investigation is on the level, more resignations should follow.

“The broadcaster has decided to review its climate and energy policy reporting after a string of controversies,” the Telegraph reported Sunday. “It has been forced to make a series of corrections, with some programs being removed altogether.”

Telegraph columnist Charles Moore wrote two years ago that the BBC’s coverage of climate change is “very self-important, very emotional and very, very one-sided.” 

The headline over the column: “Net zero’s dam has burst, but the BBC is still papering over the cracks.”

Moore argued the public was “still being shamefully ill informed by the BBC about differing views on climate change policy – on the science (the role, for example, of ‘natural variability’), the efficacy of government intervention, the real costs, the possibilities of adaptation rather than resistance and so on.”

He also noted how the BBC’s climate coverage has gone “to comic extremes” and magnified radical voices while silencing contrary ones.

Moore could have been talking about U.S. media coverage of global warming. The legacy outlets have long practice stoking alarm, distorting their reports to give the public the impression that “doomsday is approaching” and ignoring and even ostracizing honest scientists who don’t agree with the narrative as if they don’t exist.

“The discrepancy between the claims about climate change and the actual facts is so shocking that it suggests the ‘climate crisis’ is largely a media creation, built on sensationalistic headlines and useful solely to advancing the political agenda of the left,” says Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute.

The BBC claims to be “the world’s leading public service broadcaster,” but critics are correct to point out it is “lost,” as Sky News host Rita Panahi has said in regard to the editing scandal. It is not an “isolated” case of institutional bias nor “a simple misjudgment.”

“The BBC’s institutional bias goes well beyond Donald Trump,” she says.

Clearly the BBC hates Trump, yet a reporter there once shed tears for terrorist Yasser Arafat. The broadcaster has also been “been forced to take down a story falsely suggesting car insurers were racist after getting it “thoroughly wrong,” says the Telegraph and credibly accused of “downplaying the suffering of Israelis in the war with Hamas to paint their country as the aggressor.”

Going back further, there was another internal investigation, in 2007, which pointed out the danger of BBC programs “being undermined by the liberal culture of its staff.”

Five years later, a staffer wrote that “being a Tory at the BBC” is “the loneliest job in Britain.” He was a “rare breed – a conservative at the BBC.” There were so few like him, he said he “couldn’t have formed a cricket team from Tory sympathizers.” Characterizing the broadcaster as “a nest of Lefties promoting a progressive agenda and political correctness” is “uncomfortably close to the truth.”

“The BBC is biased, and it is a bias that seriously distorts public debate.”

Despite this (or maybe because of it?), the Brits put their faith in the BBC. A 2023 poll found that 44% consider it “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy” while only 21% say it’s “untrustworthy.” The next most-trusted outlet according to Britons is the Financial Times, which totaled 40% for “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy.”

It would be both deeply satisfying and a grand public service if more – many more – heads rolled, metaphorically, of course, at the BBC.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board