Feb 05 2010
Documentaries and Ofcom
Some of you might remember a TV broadcast from a couple years ago called The Great Global Warming Swindle. The central thesis, that cosmic rays are the central cause of global warming, has been long disproved. (To make the film-makers’ case more appealing they, uh, “omitted” the last 30 years of data.) Two of the interviewees filed official complaints with Ofcom because their views were misrepresented and their scientific findings distorted in order to show the opposite effect. The producer has previous record on this point and it’s a wonder anyone wants to work with him at all.
I bring all this up to mention that I saw the Ofcom summary by accident the other day:
However, whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with “due accuracy” there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.
You heard it here first — factual programmes do not have to be factual.
It seems documentaries, or programmes which look like documentaries, do not have to hew to anything we might call reality. Graphs, figures and statistics can be pulled out of the producer’s… hat and this wouldn’t matter.
The remainder of the ruling makes for some quite depressing reading. You can get away with whatever you want if you introduce your detractors as “the orthodoxy”, mention that they represent a “distortion of a whole area of science” and that they are conspiring to “invok[e] the threat of climatic disaster, to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world”. Because despite all that you are letting the opposing view have a say. The excuses can stretch even further if your programme is viewed as being “polemical”, as if unsubstantiated nonsense is its own rightness.
Totally unrelated to the above, the same document also contains other rulings, the last of which quite amused me. It was regarding a complaint against subscription-only SportXXXGirls, in which the female presenters “perform[ed] explicit sexual acts” and “invited viewers to contact them for ‘adult chat’ via a premium rate text service”. The complaint was that the “live chat” was a repeat from the week before, which wasn’t obvious (unless you’d seen the previous screening, I guess…). I can only imagine how often they get complaints like this — I don’t know how many people consider complaining about subscription porn channels — but the result was that “Ofcom viewed the recordings supplied and noted that the material shown on the 10 February 2008 was a repeat of that shown on 3 February 2008”. What a strange job…
Presumably their argument is that it’s harder to be clear what is fact in a documentary, than when you are reporting something that has or hasn’t just happened.
Which is true if you take the primary school view of ‘the news tells us what has happened’ not their perspective of it, and if you believe the ‘present belief lies 50% between two polar opposite views’ tabloid take on science and controversy. Which grown ups shouldn’t.
All of which leaves me to believe Offcom (or at least the legislative documents they work to) have no balls.