{"id":693,"date":"2007-11-09T14:18:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-09T20:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=693"},"modified":"2007-11-09T14:18:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-09T20:18:00","slug":"the-bbc-and-impartiality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/11\/the-bbc-and-impartiality\/","title":{"rendered":"The BBC and impartiality"},"content":{"rendered":"

A <\/span>day after Charlie Beckett<\/a> hosted a debate on impartiality (missed it – parenting), Robin Aitken<\/span>, ex-BBC <\/span>journo and author of Can We Trust The BBC?<\/a> came in to talk on exactly that topic to Broadcast students.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Robin basically believes in the BBC<\/span> and places great store in the Bridcut report<\/a> [pdf<\/a>] on impartiality at the Beeb<\/a>. Bridcut has twelve guiding principles (God himself has only ten, HT: Clemenceau<\/a>). Take guiding principle five: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Get that? Journalists – fair-minded, evidence-based. Contributors – controversial, passionate and polemical. Helpful, eh?)<\/p>\n

IMHO, the Bridcut guiding principles are less useful than Bill S. Preston, Esq<\/span>.<\/a> and Theodore \u201cTed\u201d Logan<\/a>\u2019s one guiding principle \u201cBe excellent to one another.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, I digress, Robin\u2019s position is that it is not impartial, because of the overwhelming liberal bias of its employees.<\/p>\n

I think you can\u2019t really get over the institutional bias. I\u2019ve met the odd socialist soldier, but realistically the military is a \u201csmall-c\u201d conservative institution. You don\u2019t want soldiers running around who are hostile to their own leaders, resentful of authority and want to ask questions first and shoot later.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The BBC likewise, is a \u201csmall-l\u201d liberal institution, you can\u2019t change that, that\u2019s just what happens when you recruit journalists. Journalists, of course – whatever their principles – can serve partisan editorial masters. But we don\u2019t want a partisan BBC.<\/p>\n

So how should it act impartially?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Next week – the Church of England<\/span>. Five hundred years, declining church attendance and still no proof of the existence of God.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-bbc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}