In 1998, while living in London, my 18-month-old daughter wasn’t feeling well and came out in a strange rash. The local GP had no idea what she had and referred her to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the world’s leading children’s clinics.

The doctors were unfamiliar with Sarah’s condition, but further investigation showed she had measles. The delayed diagnosis wasn’t due to any shortcomings in the National Health Service, but because a vaccine had all but wiped out the disease and none of the doctors, including experienced pediatricians, had actually seen it before. Luckily Sarah had that vaccination, as part of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) injection, and while she showed the symptoms she never suffered the full effects, which could be deadly.

So why did my daughter get measles in a first-world city, two decades after a vaccination had all but eradicated it? The BBC’s policy of giving all issues and views equal measure regardless of their credibility had something to with it.

In the late 1990s a report was published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, which claimed that the combination of the three drugs in the MMR vaccine (to lessen the amount of injections for babies) was linked to children with autism. The report by Andrew Wakefield was released just months before Sarah caught the measles but, as we witnessed, its impact on scaring parents out of vaccinating their children and bringing a dormant disease back to life was immediate. Wakefield was later proven to be a dodgy bastard and The Lancet retracted the article in 2007.

What does this have to do with the BBC? Because it’s charter meant it had to give crackpots like Wakefield and his believers equal time to sprout their bullshit against scientists and doctors who, backed with years of research could demonstrate that there was absolutely no link between MMR and autism. Scare campaigns work brilliantly when children are involved, so as long as the issue was discussed parents had to agonise over whether or not to vaccinate their children at all, often with with tragic consequences.

Which makes the above a rather long, but fair analogy in the context of the ridiculous speech by ABC Chairman Maurice Newman, who said ABC journalists needed to give more time to climate change sceptics.

Newman, a self-confessed climate-change agnostic, claimed there is a “groupthink” among ABC journalists on the side of climate change believers, which had led to the sceptic point of view being pushed away and not given an equal airing by the public broadcaster.

Putting this appalling insult to the ABC’s editorial integrity aside, Newman’s call to give climate deniers a say regardless of their credentials and evidence is alarming. I’m all for giving opposing views equal measure, but it’s credibility that needs to be quantified rather than time. A 15-minute interview with a highly renowned climate scientist pointing to evidence of global warming on Catalyst should be taken to task, but not by Andrew Bolt on Insiders.

 The reason why the view supporting climate change gets more of a run on the ABC is because there are relatively few climate change denialists whose views are based on hard data that’s widely supported within the scientific community. This doesn’t seem to matter to Newman, who wants stories about the impact of climate change to be offset by zealous viewpoints by the likes of Bolt and Lord Monkton, who base their arguments on selected facts and figures. The only reason they get any credibility at all is because, as shown during the MMR debacle, people will believe what they want to believe as long as there’s at least one fool to justify it.