Recalibrating the BBC’s scales – Part II

Given its legal obligation to remain impartial, a key feature of the BBC brand of impartiality is its effort to appear impartial. Its starting point, wisely enough, is an appeal to common-sense. Whenever possible, the BBC plays upon the audience’s understanding of even-handedness. To see this let’s return for a moment to domestic politics. One well-established political conception is that of a left and a right wing. Politics is visualised as a horizontal line, stretching from extreme left to extreme right, with all conceivable political viewpoints scattered at one point or another along the spectrum, for example:





For better or worse, this model is deeply ingrained in the public psyche. As such it is regularly referenced by BBC journalists in their reports. Interestingly, we can also see that it holds superficial similarity with the seesaw model suggested in Part One – seesaws of course, also have left-right dimensions. When the BBC ‘balances’ the opinions of chancellor with those of shadow chancellor the implication, at least in part, is that left is being balanced by right. Indeed we might imagine a fulcrum has been positioned, dead centre of the political spectrum:





But a moment’s thought tells us that this can’t possibly be the set-up. If it was, then there would be a bias towards extremism. Small amounts of far-right and far-left views would have the leverage to shift larger amounts of more mainstream views:





If anything, this looks like an inversion of the true system of weighting. And indeed if we invert the order of extremes on either side of the fulcrum, so that both extremes meet in the middle, we get something more familiar:





Weighted this way, extremist views exert very little influence, while the opinions of the centre-ground dominate. Now it will take a great deal of extreme opinion to shift a small amount of moderate opinion (where exactly the views of self-proclaimed centrists, like the Lib Dems, fit in this scheme is not clear – perhaps light sprinklings at both ends?)


Superficially at least, this does resemble ‘balance’ as practised at BBC news. It would indeed require a huge surge in support for, say, the BNP, before the opinions of that party came to be treated as a valid counterweight within a balanced news story. Alternatively, if the BNP was to make a modest policy shift towards the political left, say by dropping all the race hatred and concentrating solely on cultural hatred, this would cause it to slide further out along the limb, and exert greater leverage that way. Or alternatively again, if the whole corpus of national public opinion moved leftwards or rightwards, then presumably the BBC would be obliged to shift the fulcrum itself in the relevant direction, so the whole spectrum pivoted at a different point.


The credibility of this model rests upon two assumptions about impartiality. Firstly, that impartial reporting requires giving greatest weight to popularly held viewpoints. Secondly, that politically moderate opinions deserve greater weight than extreme opinions. Both these assumptions have common-sense appeal. ‘Popular’ chimes with democratic, which obviously rings of balance, and broad representation. Likewise, moderate is preferable to extreme. Extremism rings of terrorism, Stalinism, Nazism – dogmatism rather than impartiality. So this model of weighting appears to simultaneously embrace democracy and reject bigotry. Surely a sound basis for impartiality?


Well don’t dig too deep. Firstly regarding giving prominence to popular opinion. As suggested in part one, truth itself is not democratic. The beliefs of the majority can be, and frequently are, mistaken. There is nothing impartial or balanced in giving voice to false opinions about the world, even if they are widely held. But even putting that aside, even if we accept the chequered virtues of popular opinion, what is it? How is it gauged? Is it a matter of studying opinion polls and social media?; running vox-pops in shopping malls?; employing Mass Observation-style stenographers to eavesdrop at bus stops?


Cheaper and more common-sense-credible than any of that, I can think of two reference sources the BBC would freely admit it uses to gauge the political beliefs of the general public: The composition of the House of Commons and the output of the rest of the mass media. With a hop and a skip it’s all easy to conflate: We the public vote for the MPs, therefore the composition of parliament is a reflection of our political opinion. So by balancing opinions around the various opinions heard in the House, the BBC is only one remove from balancing stories around the political opinion of the citizenry. Likewise, we the public buy newspapers. Each newspaper has a political stance. So by balancing news stories around the outlook of popular newspapers the BBC is again giving voice to public opinion.


We can now see why the views of the chancellor must be balanced primarily by those of the shadow chancellor. While other citizens might hold radically different opinions on how best to run the economy, such views do not merit the same coverage because they are less popular – as evidenced by the composition of parliament and the editorial stances of the leading newspapers. No sleight of hand involved.


Moving now to the second common-sense key to impartiality – favouring political moderation. Whatever truth and virtue there might be in this, it throws up a serious question: How does the BBC determine what constitutes moderation? ‘Extreme’ is a value-laden term, meaning different things to different people. Both David Cameron and I would call ourselves political moderates. Nevertheless I consider him to be a right-wing extremist, much as he, if he knew of me, would surely consider me an extremist of the left.


So, absent a definition of extremism that we can all agree on, how does the BBC arrive at its definition? Well forgive the repetition, but common-sense moderation also seems to be derived from public opinion, itself derived from the same sources as before – the composition of the House of Commons and the output of the rest of the mass-media. Consequently, any viewpoint put forward regularly and soberly in both parliament and the Daily Mail will be deemed politically moderate by dint of that fact, and the BBC may be obliged to move the news fulcrum in that direction to balance it.


Again this does seem to tally with BBC news as practised. While on the face of it might seem extremist to advocate capital punishment or the criminalisation of homosexuality or the invasion of countries posing no threat to us, there have been times when such views were treated as moderate and reasonable. Indeed to oppose them was to render oneself extremist, and not a suitable source for balanced comment.


If this all sounds like evidence-free speculation, well, during the writing of this article the BBC offered-up a wonderful example. To help contrast the politics of the contestants in the US Democratic primaries Anthony Zurcher supplied a set of left-right spectra, comparing their stances in key policy areas. Foreign policy was particularly revealing:





As we can see, by the BBC’s measure a political moderate is someone who favours aerial bombardment, destabilisation of perceived enemy states and the continuation of US exceptionalism. An extremist on the other hand is one who questions those strategies.


At which point one might reasonably wonder how close this reading of ‘moderation’ comes to the British public’s understanding of the term – the very group the BBC is claiming to serve and represent. Indeed, upon closer inspection, incongruities such as these abound in BBC news reporting. Studying the patterns of those contradictions reveals much about the actual rather than the common-sense assumptions that underpin BBC impartiality. That will be the subject of the final part.