For commercial news outlets any obligation towards impartiality stops at that point – appearance is everything. Content, meanwhile, is precisely whatever picture of the world best suits the owner’s interests. This could simply mean whichever stories yield the largest audience, or generate the most advertising revenue; but equally, whichever stories best promote the political agenda or business interests of the owners and executives. By contrast, a publicly funded news organisation like the BBC has an obligation to remain impartial.
It’s a version of ‘no taxation without representation’. As, thankfully, we are not obliged to buy the Sun or the Mail then those papers are free to print whatever false and self-serving accounts of reality they choose. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. But as tax and T.V. licence payers we have no choice but to pay for the BBC. So as part of the deal we can demand that it remains impartial, and reports news accurately, rather than in the interests of moguls and shareholders. So how does BBC news practice impartiality?
Well perhaps it doesn’t. Many people, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, complain that it does nothing of the sort. To some degree the BBC celebrates this war on two fronts, holds it aloft as evidence of its even handedness: If both left and right attack us, we must be sailing some sort of measured course between them. It’s an appealing argument, but like most claims to impartiality (as we shall see) it is only superficial. Just because two toddlers are crying doesn’t mean they are equally guilty of hitting each other. Crying can be utilised by assailants as a distraction from what they have been up to. When a broadcaster is criticised on two fronts it is perfectly possible that one of the complainants is justified in feeling discriminated against. The other complainant may in fact have no good reason to complain, and is just squealing to drown out their opponent’s complaints, and maintain their own unfair dominance.
So what might the BBC mean when it claims to report impartially? We can start by acknowledging that there are certain things it simply cannot mean. For a start, it cannot claim to be impartial in terms of story selection. The world is a complex place. If a cat stuck up a tree can constitute a news story (as it frequently does) we can safely say each day yields a near-infinite number of potential news stories. Clearly no news agency can report on it all. The BBC must act partially, and select whatever handful of events it judges appropriate to its audience. In other words, it must operate to an agenda. This could be formally codified, or might just be a set of common-sense assumptions in the minds of the journalists and editors.
One obvious tenet of the BBC news agenda we could call ‘Britain First’. It is this bias that ensures that a non-fatal flood in Scotland becomes top story on the same day that a lethal flood in Bangladesh doesn’t even make the news. While many licence payers will nod in approval (this is the British Broadcasting Corporation) that is not the point, or rather it proves the point. Right or wrong, prioritising British news stories is an act of partiality, not impartiality. You may consider it appropriate bias, but it definitely is a bias.
So, once British exceptionalism has been dealt with, do we then move onto the vaunted impartiality? Far from it. There are other partialities to consider. We might call the next one ‘Allies Second’, with ‘Allies’ being those citizens of the world that the BBC assumes the public feels, or should feel, the greatest empathy and fraternity. Citizens of the EU and the US certainly qualify, as do those of Britain’s ex-colonies – at least the white English-speaking ones. It also includes socio-economic ‘allies’. Tragedies involving people of comparable lifestyle and spending-habits to ourselves will find it much easier to ascend the news ladder, regardless of the geographic setting: “..She’d only left the house to put credit on her phone” is considered a far more newsworthy hook than “..She’d only left the house to fetch water”.
Troublingly, the flip-side of this exceptionalism is that any story that shows ourselves and our allies in a bad light is far less likely to be selected – civilian deaths in a drone strike for example. Such stories may well go unreported, unless perhaps the victims can be rebranded ‘suspected militants’ – on the ever-trustworthy assurance of those who killed them. By contrast, violence against allies needs no qualification – instant headline.
Excruciatingly, celebrity can trump almost anything. Beyoncé’s cat stuck up a tree could easily squeeze ahead of a Scottish flood. Clearly, at some level of consciousness, strange equations are being crunched: Big Celebrity + United States > Scottish flood. Contrast with, say, Shilpa Shetty’s cat stuck up a tree (Minor celebrity + India < Scottish flood) – well down the web-page.
The BBC’s defence would presumably be that it chooses those stories that it considers to be of interest to the British public. That is certainly a workable criterion, and surely very close to what is actually happening, but it has nothing to do with impartiality. Quite to the contrary, it is catering to the very partial tastes of a particular audience. I suppose the BBC could argue that it is practicing a form of ‘national impartiality’. It is selecting that range of stories that most closely meet the British public’s criterion of impartiality. But that’s a slippery slope. What if the British public’s notion of the impartial is flawed? The BBC would then be admitting that it is prepared to abandon universal impartiality to cater to the bigoted tastes of its audience. Secondly, it only begs the question, who at BBC news is charged with assessing the British public’s sense of the impartial? What criterion are they using? As licence payers, may we see it please?
If the BBC does not, cannot, select news stories impartially, what about content? Once it has chosen its story, does the impartiality then begin? Claims to impartiality in news content reliably involve wheeling-out the concept of ‘balance.’ At first sight this might seem a simple and virtuous working principle. Indeed this is how contested issues are usually presented to us: The Chancellor says ‘blah’, the Shadow Chancellor disagrees strongly, and says ‘yadda’. A balanced news report, then, includes both the ‘yadda’ and the ‘blah’– job done.
We can picture balance here as a simple ‘see-saw’ scale. A beam of uniform length and weight, pivoting upon a fulcrum, dead centre:
The job of the impartial journalist then is to place judicious quantities of rival opinions on either end of the beam until it settles into horizontal equilibrium – perfectly balanced journalism. Appealing as this might sound, it doesn’t bear close inspection. For a start, what if there are more than two arguments to balance? Obviously this would demand a more sophisticated set of scales:
Achieving balance here looks trickier. You can imagine loading two arguments perfectly, only for the whole thing to tip-over when you try to add weight to the third. Besides, what if there are more than three sides to a story? You can’t keep adding weighing pans indefinitely. Moreover, who gets to choose whether a given opinion is a relevant counterweight to a balanced argument? The answer of course is the journalist.
And with that admission the metaphor evaporates. As soon as we accept that journalistic balance is itself a matter of individual judgement, we lose any useful comparison with scales. The really useful thing about scales is that the results can be independently verified. That’s why they are relied upon in science and commerce – different observers are forced to agree when things are balanced. Balanced opinions, on the other hand, reside wholly in the mind of the beholder. You can’t peek into a journalist’s ear and agree that the correct arguments have been selected, or that equilibrium has been attained. You only have their word for it.
Who decides which stories are relevant? Who decides which arguments are relevant to that story? Who decides the appropriate quantities of opposing arguments? Who decides when balance has been attained? Rather than an omniscient God, or the universal ether of objective truth, it’s the journalists, editors and owners. ‘Impartial’ journalism does not stand outside opinion, it is opinion. It is that organisation’s opinion of the impartial.
When a news organisation claims to present balanced stories they mean something far weaker – all they really mean is that they present more than one opinion. While as a journalistic practice this approach can be productive and enlightening, it has nothing to do with impartiality. Whether a journalist decides to pick one, three, or six viewpoints, the number and nature of those viewpoints remains their choice, informed by their beliefs. Likewise, how they present, compare and criticise those viewpoints is all their choice, informed by their beliefs. Accordingly, in political journalism ‘impartiality’ is just a label for the political outlook of that journalist, or at least the editorially required political outlook of that journalist.
Ideally it is the former. This is why the BBC are so delighted to secure the services of John Simpson, Andrew Marr, Gavin Estler and Laura Kuenssberg. Not because these journalists were born with a hot-wire link to objective impartiality, but because their ingrained sense of the impartial closely matches that required by the organisation. These people don’t need to be nudged to ensure they adhere to the BBC’s version of ‘impartiality’, they arrived with it pre-installed, a key reason that they were selected for the job.
To avoid confusion with universal impartiality (whatever that might be) perhaps it is better to think of newsroom ‘impartiality’ as a consumer brand, with the BBC keen to present itself as brand leader. What then is BBC impartiality? What factors limit the terrain it actually covers? That will be the subject of Part II.
