Fran Unsworth, new head of BBC News: Because of "experts" allegedly on the BBC staff in 2005, the BBC decided that the warmists had won the global warming debate?

- Bishop Hill blog - The new head of BBC news

Fran Unsworth has replaced Helen Boaden as head of BBC news. Like her predecessor, Helen Boaden, Ms Unsworth was in attendance at the climate seminar.

Readers might also be interested in this transcript of a conference called NewsXchange 2005, which featured Channel Four's Jon Snow and the Guardian's George Monbiot discussing global warming's potential to wipe human life off the face of the planet (I don't remember that bit of the IPCC report, do you?). Fran Unsworth was also in attendance and had some interesting things to say. You can sense the development of some of the ideas that later reappeared in the seminar.

NewsXchange 2005

Fran Unsworth: ...I absolutely agree with George that I think there was a point when it would seem that once we'd got one person setting out the case for manmade global warming and somebody opposing it, that actually the viewer is probably left with the impression that there is equal weight to these arguments. We have now moved on in our coverage of it. There is now a dwindling band of scientists who don't accept that there is manmade global warming. Our editors and our correspondents have moved on.

....Fran Unsworth: No. Exactly the point I was going to make. I think this discussion illustrates very clearly the dilemmas that journalists find themselves in, because of the conflicting arguments that surround this and the difficulties of getting to any kind of way of guiding audiences through it. That's why we have experts, of course, on our staff [what are the names of these BBC climate experts?], to assess the weight of all these arguments.