The decision could set a precedent. In a press release published Tuesday, Arcom, the French audiovisual watchdog, for the first time warned a media outlet for a climate-sceptical sequence, reports the Huffington Post.
The organization estimated that several passages from the program “Bercoff”, broadcast on Sud Radio last December, while COP28 was in full swing in Qatar, “contradicted or minimized” the scientific consensus around climate change, “by a treatment lacking rigor and without contradiction.” The Quota Climat collective, which campaigns for better treatment of ecological issues in the media, alerted Arcom.
“Climate scam”
In this show, André Bercoff received François Gervais, a physicist and climate skeptic and very controversial essayist, who regularly speaks of a “climate scam”. “At the end of the reign of Louis XIV, it was cold, there were bad harvests and the cold kills more surely than a little heat,” he explains on Sud Radio.
Its director defends himself to Novethic : “I would not like there to be a ban on speech on certain subjects. The truth of today is not always that of tomorrow, which was not that of yesterday. »
An affirmed scientific consensus
A reasoning that poses a problem because global warming is not a debate, but the subject of a scientific consensus affirmed, among others, by the IPCC in each of its reports, as the Huff Post points out.
For its part, Quota Climat is delighted on social networks with “an essential first for regulating the quality of environmental information in French broadcasting”.
During this hot period, we have noticed a drop in ecological reports in the news since the beginning of June (from 4.45% of reports on February 1 to almost 0% – News observatory source). In terms of political interviews, it’s not much better. pic.twitter.com/gFtvLKeblZ
— Climat Medias (@ClimatMedias) June 25, 2024
The collective nevertheless recalls the many efforts still to be made to give the space that global warming and environmental issues deserve in the media, which almost completely disappeared from the news on TF1 and France 2 in June.