The BBC has quietly edited an episode of Question Time after wrongly ‘correcting’ Reform’s Richard Tice on a claim about CO2 emissions. Tice said humans are responsible for just 4% of emissions but Fiona Bruce falsely said it was a third. The Telegraph has the story.
Richard Tice, the Reform UK Deputy Leader, appeared on Thursday night’s panel show following his party’s sweeping gains in the local elections last week.
During the show, which was recorded before a live audience but broadcast later, he was asked about his party’s position on climate change policies, which he said was to “scrap Net stupid Zero”.
In the debate, Fiona Bruce, the host, intervened to correct Mr Tice on the proportion of carbon emissions that are man-made.
The MP for Boston and Skegness claimed that it was “about 3 or 4%” of all emissions, to which Bruce said that, according to Nasa, it was around a third.
Mr Tice claimed that he approached a BBC editor after the show to tell them that the statistic was a mistake, and was informed that the information had come from BBC Verify, the broadcaster’s fact-checking unit.
The exchange with Bruce was then edited out of the programme, but the BBC has not reflected this in the show uploaded to its iPlayer.
The BBC said the segment was edited out because “two statistics were compared which were not directly comparable” and therefore “more context would have been needed to explain the two statistics sufficiently”.
BBC Verify was launched in 2023, when its purpose was described as “explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth”.
But the unit has been accused of making errors and being politically biased. …
Mr Tice told the Telegraph: “This is the second time in a matter of months where the presenter has wrongly challenged a Reform representative, and essentially made them look bad in front of the audience and other panellists.
“They’ve relied on BBC Verify, which perhaps should be named BBC Guesswork. Clearly Reform wants to be on the programme but if we feel that we’re constantly being assailed with false information by the programme-makers, it becomes less attractive.”
He added: “If BBC Verify is giving duff information on live shows that is regurgitated as fact by presenters, then the BBC is in serious trouble.”
Worth reading in full.
NASA claims that around a third of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere has been contributed by humans since 1850, i.e., all of the increase in that time. However, Tice’s statement concerned the human contribution to annual emissions in the carbon cycle rather than the total amount of the gas in the atmosphere.
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