A day after Charlie Beckett hosted a debate on impartiality (missed it – parenting), Robin Aitken, ex-BBC journo and author of Can We Trust The BBC? came in to talk on exactly that topic to Broadcast students.
Robin basically believes in the BBC and places great store in the Bridcut report [pdf] on impartiality at the Beeb. Bridcut has twelve guiding principles (God himself has only ten, HT: Clemenceau). Take guiding principle five:
Impartiality is no excuse for insipid programming. It allows room for fair-minded, evidence-based judgments by senior journalists and documentary-makers, and for controversial, passionate and polemical arguments by contributors and writers.
(Get that? Journalists – fair-minded, evidence-based. Contributors – controversial, passionate and polemical. Helpful, eh?)
IMHO, the Bridcut guiding principles are less useful than Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Theodore “Ted” Logan’s one guiding principle “Be excellent to one another.”
Still, I digress, Robin’s position is that it is not impartial, because of the overwhelming liberal bias of its employees.
I think you can’t really get over the institutional bias. I’ve met the odd socialist soldier, but realistically the military is a “small-c” conservative institution. You don’t want soldiers running around who are hostile to their own leaders, resentful of authority and want to ask questions first and shoot later.
And yet the armed forces, despite – or perhaps because of their institutional bias – are impartial in the execution of the wishes of their political masters (saving any disagreements for retirement).
The BBC likewise, is a “small-l” liberal institution, you can’t change that, that’s just what happens when you recruit journalists. Journalists, of course – whatever their principles – can serve partisan editorial masters. But we don’t want a partisan BBC.
So how should it act impartially?
To do so it needs rules, not guiding principles. Those rules need to be in the form of a constitution, and that needs voting on. Constitutional issues need independent judgement. When judgements are made they need justification. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone with a Politics GCSE.
My biggest criticism of the BBC is simple – where, after 80 years is its editorial case law? It has a more impressive literature on pronunciation.
(Next week – the Church of England. Five hundred years, declining church attendance and still no proof of the existence of God.)
7 responses to “The BBC and impartiality”
It still makes pronunciation howlers on foreign names.
Try UK names. Great Yarmouth (pron. Ja – like German yes) was nearly flooded by the River Yare (pron. Yeah) this week. The Today programme mispronounced the name of the river all morning, both the presenters and the reporter they parachuted in, who presumably couldn’t be bothered to find out. We did learn about how cold it was though…
slough is a tough one.
Just read “Troublesome Young Men” about the goings on at Westminster leading up to WWII. Certainly a time of much more diversity in the press. The Daily Mail openly supported Hitler, The Times would do nothing to upset him.
And who wouldn’t give the Germans a fair crack of the whip over re-armament and wandering into the Rhineland in 1936!
There’s a good discussion of impartiality here.
The case law is here Adrian:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/
ALthough because we’ve called them guidelines rather than rules or law you probably won’t like them ;-). But they are all based on experience, good and bad.
R
It’s a rigour and process thing. The Church of England line was for you btw!
The last thing the BBC needs is another layer of bureaucracy – which is exactly what a ‘constitution’ would create. Who would vote – employees? license-fee payers? Most likely any such plan would end up in the hands of an elite group of outsiders like the BBC Trust, shackling those fair-minded journalists who are trying to find passionate contributors while the commercial world runs rings around the corporation.