The BBC and its Continuing False Balance Problem

http://www.shchambers.com/

"'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows" - Isaiah Berlin

"What I'm asking of the world's oldest public broadcaster is an understanding of the difference between impartiality and balance. What I mean is your nonsense bloody quota of giving equal coverage no matter what...we put up a Nobel prize winning economist to highlight the negative impact on Sterling if we leave, and then you feel you have to give equal weight to some batty backbencher who's just there to parrot "not true, project fear, take back control"" - Words put into Craig Oliver's mouth, played by Rory Kinnear, speaking to the BBC, in Brexit: The Uncivil War

I've written before about Isaiah Berlin's concept of positive liberty, a surfeit of which is really a prerequisite for a  properly functioning democracy. I previously described it as "the freedom to choose the ideal life; ideal, that is, according to informed reason". "Informed reason" is the key phrase here. Berlin contrasts this with negative liberty, which I described as "the freedom to conduct our lives without obstruction from other people or groups of people, including the state".

Firstly, positive liberty is a prerequisite because in a free market economy we need participants who are as well informed as possible to ensure that the market operates as well as it can.¹ A market ignorant of derivatives, amongst other things, caused the credit crunch.

Secondly, we need citizens who are as well informed as possible to ensure they make the best choices when acting politically, either as representatives of the population, or as voters.

Unfortunately the rise of Trump and the emergence of far right narratives in the UK which have resulted in the vote to leave the European Union show that our society is in a dangerous place. The currency of facts is flowing very slowly, thanks to decades of misinformation and attacks on science and expertise. Many of these attacks are documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway  in Merchants of Doubt. They sum it up very well:

Our story began in the 1950s, when the tobacco industry first enlisted scientists to aid its cause, and deepened in the 1970s when Frederick Seitz joined forces with tobacco, and then with Robert Jastrow and Bill Nierenberg to defend the Strategic Defense Initiative. It continued in the early 1980s as Fred Singer planted the idea that acid rain wasn’t worth worrying about, and Nierenberg worked with the Reagan White House to adjust the Executive Summary of his Acid Rain Peer Review Panel. It continued still further, and turned more personal, in the 1990s as the Marshall Institute, with help from Singer and [Dixy Lee] Ray, challenged the evidence of ozone depletion and global warming and personally attacked distinguished scientists like Sherwood Rowland and Ben Santer.

Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? Because they felt—as did Lt. General Daniel O. Graham (one of the original members of Team B and chief advocate of weapons in space) when he invoked the preamble to the U.S. Constitution—they were working to “secure the blessings of liberty.” If science was being used against those blessings—in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise—then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. For indeed, science was starting to show that certain kinds of liberties are not sustainable—like the liberty to pollute. Science was showing that Isaiah Berlin was right: liberty for wolves does indeed mean death to lambs. - Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 238). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Later:

...the idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism. - Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 250). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition, my emphasis

On the issue of media balance they say this:

“Balance” had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority—in some cases extreme minority—views. In principle, the media could act as gatekeepers, ignoring the charlatans and snake oil salesmen, but if they have tried, our story shows that at least where it comes to science they have failed. As we have seen, it wasn’t just obviously right-wing outlets that reported false claims about tobacco and these other subjects; it was the “prestige press”—indeed, the allegedly liberal press—as well. - Oreskes, Naomi. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (p. 243). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

This false balance has been, and continues to be, a serious problem in the BBC's coverage of the news. In 2011 Steve Jones wrote a report on the BBC's treatment of science and said this:

Equality of voice calls for a match of scientists not with politicians or activists, but with those qualified to take a knowledgeable, albeit perhaps divergent, view of research. Attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims interest can make for false balance: to free publicity to marginal opinions and not to impartiality, but its opposite. Conflicts of interest and outright dishonesty exist in science and these must be exposed, but not at the cost of an over‐literal interpretation of the guidelines. The BBC has tried to find a solution to this problem but has not entirely succeeded. It must accept that it is impossible to produce a balance between fact and opinion. The notion of due impartiality in science should be treated with more flexibility. The central criterion of the new Guidelines,  that the BBC should seek to achieve “due weight” in its coverage of  perspectives and opinions and that minority views should not necessarily be given equal treatment,  may do something in this regard although proof of that has yet to emerge. (my emphasis)

This recommendation has clearly gone unheeded by many in the corporation. Consider this tweet by Rob Burley, Editor of BBC Live Political Programmes. Politics Live, Andrew Marr Show, This Week, Westminster Hour & Newswatch:

Dear #bbcbias mongers, if we are featuring people on BBC political programmes who you disagree with, this is proof of impartiality not bias. If we weren’t hearing dissent from your position then you’d have a reason to be worried.

— Rob Burley (@RobBurl) December 17, 2018

No, no, no, this is not proof of impartiality. In response I tweeted:

That's not 'proof' of impartiality, it's a prerequisite. Proof would be an analysis of BBC coverage that showed a fair hearing to all sides proportionate to their validity. *Undue* coverage to far right/left views could then show bias, even though they dissent from my views.

— Mark Jones (@Groveler) December 17, 2018

The point being that simply giving a hearing to all sides of a debate will give rise to the false balance Steve Jones warned about and which has blighted our media ever since the 'merchants of doubt' started to wage their propaganda war against the truths that threaten their interests.

And it's not like some don't understand the issue. Last year BBC journalist Nick Robinson's views were reported in The New Statesman:

In Robinson’s view, the BBC doctrine of “due impartiality” should, when properly observed, enable his colleagues to “take account of how much support someone has and the evidence underlying his or her arguments before deciding how much coverage he is entitled to. We need to move beyond ‘he said, she said’ and ask ‘what is?’” Neutrality should not, indeed, deny the proper function of journalism.

And yet the BBC still don't do it. In 2017 the BBC had to apologise for putting the unqualified climate change denier Nigel Lawson up against a climate change expert in Robinson's own Radio 4 Today programme:

The Today programme rejected initial complaints from listeners, arguing that Lawson’s stance was “reflected by the current US administration” and that offering space to “dissenting voices” was an important aspect of impartiality.

This is the line pursued by Rob Burley in his tweet from December 2018, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong, as Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics explained:

“There needs to be a shift in BBC policy so that these news programmes value due accuracy as much as due impartiality.

“As well as taking account of the rights of marginal voices like Lord Lawson to be heard, the BBC should also take account of the harm that its audiences can experience from the broadcast of inaccurate information,” said Ward. “His inaccurate assertion that there has been no change in extreme weather was harmful to the programme’s listeners because they may have been misled into believing that they do not need to take precautions against the increasing risk of heatwaves and flooding from heavy rainfall in the UK.”

So we're back to the quote from Brexit: The Uncivil War; Craig Oliver's cry of anguish when talking to the BBC. Oliver was the leader of the Remain campaign:

What I'm asking of the world's oldest public broadcaster is an understanding of the difference between impartiality and balance. What I mean is your nonsense bloody quota of giving equal coverage no matter what...we put up a Nobel prize winning economist to highlight the negative impact on Sterling if we leave, and then you feel you have to give equal weight to some batty backbencher who's just there to parrot "not true, project fear, take back control"

I believe it is this false balance, in the BBC and elsewhere, that has reduced the positive liberty of UK citizens, and led them to make fateful errors when voting in the referendum and pursuing their political goals in other ways. In Berlin's terms, we have a surfeit of negative liberty (freedom for the pike), but a deficit of positive liberty.

It has been such a campaign of misinformation that I really think this is an existential threat to Western democracy. It is hard to see how, if we continue to pursue misinformed policies uncorrected, we can survive in the form we are now. I fear a breakdown of law and order as demagogues take power. Trump is a demagogue, as are Bolsonaro and Gündoğan; who will be ours?

I previously shared Stephen Pinker's optimism in the upward trend of humanity, but now I'm not sure those angels will save us :-(.

For further reading on the causes of Brexit, see:

Peter Jukes - A Duty to Inform as Well as Entertain: The BBC on the Edge of an Abyss

Chris Grey - Britain is on the brink of an historic strategic decision

Simon Wren-Lewis - Experts and Elites

Ian Dunt - Backstop breakdown is a product of the oldest Brexit lie

1 Perfect knowledge is impossible, of course, but disinformation will tend to corrupt the operation of a free market economy. And we must accept that humans are not a perfectly rational animal, even if they were omniscient, so we can only aspire to perfect reason.

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The Problem of Theistic Philosophers of Religion

Roman Catholic Dr Tim Stanley has written a paranoid piece attacking Richard Dawkins and 'atheist trolls' who constantly mock his beliefs. He writes:

When you insult my faith you go right to the heart of what makes me me. When you're trying to convince me in 140 characters of sub-GCSE philosophical abuse that God doesn't exist, you're trying to take away the faith that gets me up in the morning, gets me through the day and helps me sleep at night. You're ridiculing a God without whom I suspect I might not even be alive, and a God that I prayed to when my mother was going through cancer therapy. You're knocking a Church that provides me with compassion and friendship without asking for anything in return – perhaps the greatest, most wonderful discovery of my adult life. You see, people don't generally believe in God for reasons of convenience or intellectual laziness. It's usually fulfilling a deep need – filling a soul with love that might otherwise be quite empty and alone. In short, when you try to destroy someone's faith you're not being a brilliant logician. You're being a jerk.

Well, maybe not so paranoid. He has a point, does he not? If Stanley is typical of theists, and I suspect he may be, then they invest much more emotionally in their faith than non-believers do in their belief systems. Attacking their beliefs is an attack on them, if they identify so closely and emotionally with them. This is not to say that non-believers are not passionate about science, or truth, or rationality, or even humanism, but they appear to be typically less emotionally invested in them. They might 'pray' to science to help their mother get through cancer therapy, but that prayer would lack the personal element that marks out theism.

Stephen Law has written in his book Believing Bullshit about the emotional factor in forging people's beliefs:

...you might harness the emotional power of iconic music and imagery. Ensure people are regularly confronted by portraits of Our Leader accompanied by smiling children and sunbeams emanating from his head (those Baghdad murals of Saddam Hussein spring to mind). Ensure your opponents and critics are always portrayed accompanied by images of catastrophe and suffering, or even Hieronymus-Bosch-like visions of hell. Make people emotional dependent on your own belief system. Ensure that what self-esteem and sense of meaning, purpose and belonging they have is derived as far as possible from their belonging to your system of belief. Make sure they recognise that abandoning that belief system will involve the loss of things about which they care deeply.

Such practices have been part of atheistic ideologies, of course, but they are the bread and butter of religion.

So it seems obvious to me that theists operating in philosophy are going to struggle to do philosophy when it touches on their faith beliefs. If such a philosopher ring-fences their faith beliefs, and has a heavy emotional investment in them, this automatically biases their work, and the less bias a philosopher can bring to their analysis, the better the philosophy. I questioned the coherence of 'Christian Philosophy' here, whilst accepting it as a term for philosophy conducted by Christians. This does not mean that I think Christians, or theists, cannot be good philosophers. Clearly they can. But just as scientists use the scientific method to counteract the problems even the best of them have investigating reality, so it would benefit philosophers to adopt practices that counteract their biases. This also applies to non-believers, but more so to believers.

Paul Draper and Ryan Nichols have a piece in the latest issue of The Monist, called Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion. Ryan Nichols writes about it here, for those who want to read some more about it. The abstract says philosophy of religion is:

... too partisan, too polemical, too narrow in its focus, and too often evaluated using criteria that are theological or religious instead of philosophical. Our diagnosis is that, because of the emotional and psychosocial aspects of religion, many philosophers of religion suffer from cognitive biases and group influence.

The piece investigates some evidence that supports my intuitions about theistic philosophers. I don't think it's an open and shut case, but it is suggestive, I think. As per the abstract, they discuss four symptoms of poor health in philosophy of religion:

[I]t is too partisan, too polemical, too narrow in its focus, and too often evaluated using criteria that are theological or religious instead of philosophical.

Partisanship seems obvious, on both sides. The polemicism they worry about includes the sort of language that is often used: the language of conflict and opposition. On focus, they write:

Typically, religion is unreflectively equated with some form of theism or even classical theism, and atheism is equated with naturalism or even physicalism, ignoring the broad and plausible territory between those extremes. Alternatives like "generic theism" (that is, theism combined with a rejection of all alleged special revelations), pantheism, ietsism, and deism are rarely mentioned, and when they are mentioned they are usually dismissed as positions that very few people hold, which is not only spectacularly false, but hardly an appropriate constraint on philosophical inquiry. Even worse, it is often just assumed that the only viable forms of theism are Muslim, Christian, or Jewish.

This is very true. William James dismissed Islam as a live option for belief and, of course, in a similar way most religious believers do not take other religious beliefs as seriously as those they have faith in. I mean, they do not invest the time and emotional energy in the many religious beliefs from around the world that theists in those countries take as seriously as their own. This means that many possible philosophical positions are dismissed out of hand because of pre-existing beliefs. This is a problem for everyone, not just believers, of course, but one would expect a religious believer's emotional investment to make it a bigger problem for them.

Then they point out that too often positions are criticised based on religious beliefs, such as incompatibility with scripture:

Reinforcing such behavior is the fact that the motto of one of the premier journals in the field is "faith seeking understanding." This motto echoes the belief of some of the most influential philosophers of religion (e.g. Plantinga 1984) that philosophers who happen to be Christians should take the truth of Christian doctrines (as they happen to interpret them) as a starting point for philosophical inquiry.

They look at psychological studies to see if they support these contentions. They note that for confirmation bias:

...the strongest effects were among sophisticated, smart participants, and participants with strong prior commitments about the issues.

So if stronger prior commitments are reflected in those with more emotional investment in a belief, they would suffer the strongest confirmation bias:

We have several reasons to think that similar results are sure to be found when the above experiments are replicated with arguments about religion, especially when using philosophers of religion as participants. First, philosophers are emotional creatures like other humans. Second, professional philosophers of religion would score high on tests of sophistication about arguments in philosophy of religion as opposed to control participants. Third, many religious philosophers of religion, having committed their whole lives to a body of religious doctrine, have strong emotions about their religious beliefs. The last two observations set religious philosophers of religion apart from other groups of  philosophers —from, say, four-dimensionalist metaphysicians.

I think there is some truth to this, although there seem to be many controversies in philosophy that raise high emotions and are not exclusively religious. Consider the existence of objective morals, the free will debate and the hard problem of consciousness, for example. But many theists, like Stanley, make a point of highlighting the importance of their faith, suggesting it is more deeply held than non-belief. I'm inclined to agree with them. If a theist holds this position then they would have to agree, if they accept the studies cited, that they are more prone to certain biases. Draper and Nichols continue:

There are good reasons to believe that the emotional attachments that many religious philosophers have to their religious groups are exceptionally strong. 

Among the group memberships a professional philosopher might have, few if any compete with religion for social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive importance.

If religious philosophers of religion have social and psychological tendencies at all similar to those found in religious people in general, then symptoms like excessive partisanship and narrowness of focus, and perhaps even the blurring of religious and philosophical criteria of evaluation, are to be expected.

Echoing Stanley's sentiments, they point out:

The attachment system operates in Christianity, for example, by making Jesus, God, or Mary functional attachment figures and fictive kin.

For religious persons, including religious philosophers of religion, who are attached to God the Father and who have an emotional conviction that their Father loves them, reading an argument that their Father does not exist primes negative emotional responses (whether above or below levels of conscious awareness).

They caution:

Bias is no doubt a problem in all areas of philosophy, but given the large percentage of religious believers in philosophy of religion, the emotional depth of religious attachments, and the strong connection between bias and the emotions, there is good reason to believe that it is much more damaging to inquiry in philosophy of religion than to inquiry in most other areas of philosophy. 

I think that most theists would agree that they have a more emotional attachment to their beliefs than non-believers, so I think they should agree with this diagnosis. Draper and Nichols make some strong recommendations to counteract any bias:

Our first recommendation is for philosophers of religion to distance themselves in every way possible from apologetics, whether theistic or atheistic.

This seems sensible, and may be why I sense that quite a few non-believing philosophers of religion are antipathetic to 'new atheism'. They may consider it too polemical, too atheistically apologetic.

Second, we recommend that philosophers of religion use argument construction less often as a method for making cases for the positions they hold, and more often as a method of testing those positions.

This is a fascinating recommendation, and a difficult one to pull off; but when a philosopher puts forward a really good argument against their own position, you know that good philosophy is occurring. I know I'm not very good at it! But I admire those who are.

A third recommendation is to make a conscious effort to allow, as J.L. Schellenberg puts it, the voice of authority to grow dim.

Indeed. Argue the case; don't defer to Aquinas or Descartes. I realise I say this in a blog citing Draper and Nichols, but then, I am no philosopher!

Finally, our fourth recommendation, which is the hardest of all to follow, is to make a conscious decision to accept genuine risk.

I really think that this is where many with faith would draw the line. The point of faith, I think, is to separate doctrine and dogma, to put them beyond risk. This is counter to this recommendation.

Even if a scientist is sure of some cherished hypothesis, testing that hypothesis by experiment is (in many though admittedly not all cases) inherently risky. Apologetics by comparison is very safe insofar as pursuing it is very unlikely to result in the apologist rejecting any of the central doctrines of the religious community he or she serves. Philosophy should be riskier - the philosopher of religion must be prepared to abandon cherished beliefs.

Theists can risk their beliefs, however, or none would ever lose their faith. Draper and Nichols compare the contrasting attitudes of Rudolf Otto and Gary DeWeese.

Otto says, "The earth disappeared from under my feet. That was the result of my studies at Erlangen. I went there not so much to quest for truth, but more to vindicate belief. I left with the resolve to seek nothing but the truth, even at the risk of not finding it in Christ" (Almond 1984, 12). Although Otto remained throughout his career a theologian by title, he was an exemplary philosopher of religion in many ways. He is famous, of course, because he wrote one of the greatest works in the history of the philosophy of religion, namely. The Idea of the Holy. It is abundantly clear that, had Otto not rejected apologetics in favor of a more philosophical approach to religious inquiry, he would not and could not have written this masterpiece.

DeWeese:

As Christian scholars we are of course free to entertain all manner of "what if" questions, some heterodox, some heretical.... While we're free to entertain such thoughts, I believe we are constrained by our faith to answer them in certain ways. If it seems to me that if a particular claim is well-argued but it contradicts a significant tenet of the faith . . . , then I should seek to refute rather than defend it.

I think theistic philosophers might argue that non-believers are as susceptible to the problems outlined by Draper and Nichols. In this piece, for example, Christian philosopher Randal Rauser considers the naturalist response to Thomas Nagel's recent book as indicative of something:

What happens if you violate naturalism? Here I’ll be brief because the fallout from Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos has been well documented elsewhere. Just consider Andrew Ferguson’s fascinating article “The Heretic: Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?” It is no surprise that scholars are heaping insults on Nagel, a worldclass philosopher and atheist, for daring to challenge philosophical naturalism. After all, this ain’t just mere epiphenomenalism. This is a theory that goes to the very foundations for many of these folk. Kind of like challenging the incarnation at a Christian school, eh?

I'm not sure this is a true analog with religious belief, but it may be. And if it is, then the religious will have to give up any claim to special respect for their beliefs, à la Stanley. Either they claim they have a more emotional connection to their beliefs than non-believers, and accept the psychological consequences of that, whatever they turn out to be, or they agree that non-believers can treat their religious beliefs as any other non-religious belief; Dawkins and 'atheist trolls' are free to attack them without believers claiming a 'special' identity with their beliefs.

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