Joe Smith has responded to the Smaller World post a couple of days back in which I noted his involvement in some of the BBC shows that had fallen foul of the BBC's sponsorship rules and also in a series of BBC seminars that were also funded by environmental groups. Many thanks are due to Dr Smith for having made this effort.
The response takes the form of a full posting on Dr Smith's blog. This is the guts of it:
...the post and comments raise questions about the Earth Reporters series on which I was the Open University’s nominated academic adviser. Two of the programmes appear in a list that the BBC Trust have reviewed in terms of the nature of their sponsorship and the visibility at the beginning and end of the programme of any sponsorship arrangements. There isn’t much for me to say on this. Institutionally we were very happy with the programmes: they make for really handy documentaries on diverse environmental topics and very successfully help to bring individual examples of human ingenuity and doggedness to the fore in problem solving around the world. However the content of the programmes was not the Trusts’ concern: once they had established that they were not current affairs programmes they were looking at the nature of the crediting of the sponsorship on these and a large number of other programmes. The Open University have a forty year history of partnership with the BBC on the basis of shared public service objectives, and hence we are very uncomplicated partners as co-producers in this and many other instances of great programming (e.g. the wonderful Frozen Planet currently on BBC One in the UK). My institution does not get involved in the BBC’s consideration of how other parties are credited on e.g. BBC World – its just not our business. As an aside I can say in a personal capacity that I thought the BBC Trust’s judgements were spot on. It is critical that the BBC and its governance structures constantly walk the border to protect public recognition of the institution’s impartiality.