I have heard religious leaders on the radio being asked about the science of abortion. Radio DJ's giving advice on the MMR vaccine. I have heard white van men being wheeled on to discuss road safety.
Now, all of the above topics deserve serious debate, by qualified people. When a scientist stands up and says; "we have looked at the meta data and found that homoeopathy is no more effective than Placebo", the BBC do NOT need to then "balance" that fact with nonsense from a vested interest. The balance is built into the Science. That's what good science is. They only need balance if they are reporting bad science.
If they are trying to uncover Bad Science then that is a different matter. The big problem is that the very large majority of journalists don't understand science at all and are therefore not able to distinguish good science from bad. Good science has balance, it requires no "other side of the story". Good science takes all sides of all stories and measures each of them, sets it self up to fail and only when it has proved it has been peer reviewed - where independent people check that all sides of the argument have been measured and taken into account does it become "good science".
Yet bad science is easy to spot, firstly though you have to actually read the study you are reporting on. The Daily Mail reports on some new
cause of cancer pretty much every week, they also report on some new potential cure for cancer on a similar basis. I don;t believe they do this to inform readers of the perils of drinking too much coffee, or to persuade us to all eat less bacon, they do it becuase it sells papers. We are all scared of Cancer and we all want to avoid it, selling stories about how people might achieve this is good business, but it rarely makes for good Science.
All of this serves to undermine good science. It gives people a perverted view of science and leads them to mistrust it. When one reads in a Tabloid that Scientists have come up with a formula to prove that Tuesdays are the worst day of the week, what they don't report is that the "study" was paid for by a PR company trying to promote some Tuesday night event. They never report that there is no actual science in the study, that a real scientist didn't do the work, that it's just a bit of fun. No they report it as Science even though it's rarely anything of the sort. They certainly never point out that all the journalist has done is to copy and paste a press release from a PR company.
This can have a pretty devastating effect. When a group of real scientists say something like "we have found good evidence that man made CO2 emissions contribute to climate change" , the public judge that statement against the quality of all the other bad science and good science reported badly that they have been exposed to. They have no fair frame of reference to judge it by.
If you want to know why people stopped giving their kids the MMR jab, you actually can't blame Andrew Wakefeild and his appallingly bad "science", you can blame the press that reported his made up findings as fact. Even though the smallest amount of journalistic integrity would have shown them all that the science was bogus.
If you wonder why people write off man made climate change as a conspiracy, don't blame the East Anglian scientist for changing the wording of an email to try and clarify a mathematical anomaly, blame the reporters that claim that this minor details undermines everything else said in those emails.
The popular press, the BBC, ITV the media as a whole gives science a bad name, sometimes in a cynical attempt to sell copy, often through downright laziness. Don;t believe them. Find out for yourself, the truth is out there and it's not available on conspiracy forums or anti vac forums, it's available on science forums. Science is the balance. Good science. Well reported is the answer. Sadly it's rarely as exciting as the facts.
EDIT - BBC Trust agree with me!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14218989
Although the headline details the praise they received! Balanced?
