Do we like David Attenborough?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of using his platform for wildlife and the climate, with no harmful words or acts found and one argued-over line on population.
Born in 1926 and raised in Leicester in a family of academics and writers, Attenborough was a kid who collected fossils and bird eggs. A scholarship took him to Cambridge to study natural sciences, then two years in the Royal Navy. He joined the BBC in the early 1950s as a trainee and never really left the natural world after that.
Zoo Quest in 1954 took cameras out to film animals in the wild, and its success led the BBC to set up its Natural History Unit. He ran BBC Two in the 1960s, then quit management in 1972 to make films. Life on Earth in 1976 was the big bang, and Planet Earth, Blue Planet and a pile of others followed.
The harm check comes up clean on people. We found no remarks against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or people of colour, and no tie-ins with anyone pushing conspiracy theories. His public stance runs the other way: he has told world leaders the climate is in crisis and said he keeps some hope for the future.
The asterisk is population. He has argued publicly that the world is overpopulated, and his comments on it produced the two biggest spikes of online chatter about him in 2020. Some commentators say it points blame the wrong way, so it's a contested position rather than anything nasty from him.
The only real stoush we found was a 2023 Guardian report that the BBC had pulled an episode of Wild Isles to avoid right-wing backlash. The BBC called it totally inaccurate, saying the series was always five parts and the separate film came from conservation groups. That's a fight about the broadcaster, not something Attenborough did.
The good stuff is long and public. WWF gave him its Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Award in 2021, crediting six decades of broadcasting on the natural world. He won a Daytime Emmy at 99 for Secret Lives of Orangutans, and is the only person to win the Outstanding Narrator Emmy three years running.