The ABC broadcast bullying and science hooliganism problem

However, it is also in breach of what is required of Williams as a broadcaster and journalist, and of Williams’ employer, the ABC. As a result Williams and the ABC owe Aitkin an apology and Australia an explanation. After all, a public intellectual ought to be able to go to work without suffering workplace harassment from a colleague.

Let’s look at the breaches.

A journalist is required to quote accurately, and not to misrepresent sources. The quote from The Spectator is a put-up job. The paragraph that Williams quotes is a straw case which The Spectator reviewer goes on to rebut, concluding with a paragraph starting with these words:

“In truth, pugilists on both side of the argument need to recognise that while expertise is always paramount, it is not out of place for other leading public figures to pose intelligent questions.”

Furthermore Ockham’s Razor would be classed by the ABC either as “opinion content” or “topical and factual content”. The ABC is required to be impartial at the platform level “This means that while individual items of content can take a particular perspective on an issue, the ABC must be able to demonstrate at the platform level that it has provided … a range of different perspectives …” (PDF 1.65MB). It also requires impartiality at the program level, where the four key values of honesty, fairness, independence and respect should still apply.

So chafed is Williams at the requirement of the ABC to produce balanced programming that he undercuts it at the program level with an introduction that might be independent, but is not honest, fair or respectful.

It is also not high quality.

I’ve already noted Williams’ dishonesty or incompetence in misleadingly quoting from The Spectator, but the argument from authority should never have been advanced by Williams in the first instance. Not only is it logically fallacious - bad facts are not made good because they are advanced by a person with a reputation - but Williams himself fails the test he sets Aitkin.

He isn’t a climate scientist, he’s a science broadcaster with an honours degree in biology. The chances are that he has no formal training in physics, the key to understanding climate science. So, on his own bad reasoning, he is precluded from commenting on the area.

His statistic that 90 per cent of Australians are alarmed at climate change is also suspect. It derives from polling carried out by The Climate Institute of Australia, apparently the offspring of Clive Hamilton’s Australia Institute (what SourceWatch would call an “Astroturf/industry front group” if it was from the right).

The poll was apparently of 1,005 people conducted online between March 7-11 and the actual question is not available in the report (PDF 493KB). While according to the report the data was “weighted by age, sex and location to ensure representativeness” it is in fact impossible to do this using an online survey - you can weight, but you can’t ensure. All online surveying carries a bias towards the “left” of politics, and judged on other Australian online polling samples this is somewhere in the order of 10 per cent.

Furthermore, while the poll used a five-point scale it did not give the “neutral” option of “neither concerned nor unconcerned”. So while 39 per cent were “extremely” or “very concerned” and 12 per cent (not the 10 per cent claimed by Williams) were “not very” or “not at all concerned”, 40 per cent were in the midway spot of “concerned”. In a properly structured survey I would suspect that a large proportion of these respondents would have chosen “neither concerned nor unconcerned” but they weren’t given that option.