An insightful post from Simon Wren Lewis on fiscal reporting at the BBC and its recent report.
Not much to disagree with ... except for this.
Alongside demonstrable ignorance in the way some of the BBC reports government getting and spending, there is, Simon argues, another pachyderm on the sofa:
'The second elephant is one which the report could not avoid, and that is in adopting impartiality as the overriding frame of reference ... its biggest problem is that the truth becomes of secondary importance. Impartiality seems to be defined in terms of what people think, even if what they think is just wrong.'
Simon is absolutely right about the lack of knowledge amongst the newsroom generalists, the journalists who write the news scripts, oversee the graphics, book the guests and brief the presenters.
On ‘impartiality’, though, he's sort of right. And sort of wrong.
Right, because there is a damaging frame that has exactly the outcome he says. Wrong, because ‘impartiality’ isn’t it.
It’s ‘balance’. And the two are very different from each other. Sadly, very, very few BBC editors and executives – including the DG, if his Select Committee appearance back in September is anything to go by – understand that difference.
It’s not a new confusion. Since 1926, the BBC has had to grapple publicly with governments and the powerful over ‘impartiality’ – what it means and how to both achieve and demonstrate it – and for a generation or more it’s realised it’s a problem that’s constantly shape-shifting.
Way back in 2007, just as we were all taking our first tentative steps into social media, the then BBC Trust commissioned independent TV producer and former BBC news man John Bridcut to think his way through what ‘impartiality’ meant in what he called ‘multi-polar Britain’.
John’s report, From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, mischievously positioned ‘impartiality’ in the sphere of alchemy, its ingredients:
‘a mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance, evenhandedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth.’
For all its insights, it was a piece of work that never got the traction it warranted. Instead, BBC editors – and Directors General – continued to fling around the separate ingredients of John’s impartiality cocktail as if each was sufficient in and of itself.
Worse, the words ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘balance’ bounce round BBC newsrooms as if they’re interchangeable.
They’re not.
And the most damaging false equivalence of all is that between ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’, a howler that’s guaranteed that, over the years, the BBC has got so much of its contentious coverage around its neck; climate change, the Iraq war, Brexit, immigration, Trumpism, the economy. Etc.
It’s not that hard to see why BBC editors reach for ‘balance’ when they’re challenged on ‘impartiality’. I know, I did it often enough in my twenty odd years as the editor of PM, The World at One and Today … though, in mitigation, I always knew it was an easy evasion, a cute body swerve.
Stop-watch balance and appearance counts are simple, quasi-objective ways of shooting down a complaint of partial coverage. But they tell no-one anything about whether or not that coverage was ‘impartial’.
Plus: ‘balance’ works upstream as well as down. To forestall complaints, editors inevitably spend time thinking how to ‘balance’ the sober conclusions of the carefully well-informed and tend to reach for their imagined opposite, especially if that opposite is loudly and emotionally articulated. Think MMR.
There’s no doubt that Faisal Islam and Simon Jack and their teams know who the charlatans are in any debate about political economy. Who to listen to and who, in any rational universe, should be ignored. Unquestionably they can sort the specious from the soundly based a mile off. But when it comes to what’s actually broadcast … ‘balance’.
After the BBC, I spent a few years teaching ethics to journalism students. Inevitably, ‘impartiality’ figured large. With all its ambiguities and practical challenges.
I used to use – with attribution – an anecdote that my old friend Allan Little would wheel out for those who thought ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ and ‘neutrality’ etc were interchangeable.
It was about a reporter telling the tale of a row between one man asserting ‘2+2=4’ and another insisting ‘2+2=5’.
The ‘neutral’ reporter would do no more than repeat the men’s respective claims as accurately as possible. The ‘balanced’ reporter would do much the same, making sure she gave equal time and equal emphasis to both.
(The ‘objective’ reporter, incidentally – the term most favoured by American media – couldn’t report a thing since choosing English as the reporting language and base 10 as the number system would both lack objectivity.)
The ‘impartial’ reporter, though, has two main options. Dismiss the whole thing: one of the claims is patently false so there’s no real dispute. Or report that the row’s taken place (it’s vaguely interesting after all) while pointing out that one of the men is demonstrably wrong.
And that’s the key element in the ‘impartiality’ cocktail. The one that always gets forgotten. Truth … and yes, I know, I know but let’s park that one for now.
‘Impartiality’, begins and ends with truth … or at least an aspiration to come as close to the truth as possible. It’s an active process that demands the journalist goes out – figuratively if not literally – to find and examine as much of the relevant evidence as possible. And to do so as open-mindedly as possible. Weigh significances. Dismiss falsenesses. Put outliers in context.
‘Balance’, on the other hand, is passive. It coquettishly pretends that there is no single truth. It’s content to ‘balance’ a truth with an untruth, pit evidence against emotion, place equal value on eyewitness and on spun deception. ‘Balance’ sublets the perception of significance and falseness to audiences.
So, it's quite right to assert, as Simon does, that there is a mindset in the BBC that tends to gives anti-vaxxers the same airtime as the CMO – or at least more of a hearing than their unreason deserves – or climate change deniers the same air-time as those who actually know what they’re talking about. But the root of it isn’t an ‘impartiality’ frame, it’s a ‘balance’ frame.
‘Impartiality’ isn’t part of the problem: it’s part of the answer – and not just to the shortcomings of the BBC’s fiscal reporting.
But here’s the thing: true ‘impartiality’ takes time, effort and application … something the generalists in BBC newsrooms just don’t have. Something they’re bound to have less of as the next round of cuts slices another layer off the corporation's capacities.
More: it takes courage. The confidence to say, Trussonomics wasn't just arguably crazy … it was crazy. Or that the Brexit Quitters’ campaign wasn’t arguably a lie … it was a lie. The strength to refuse to ‘balance’ truth with another lie. To take the inevitable flak from whichever gaggle of tinfoil hatters genuine ‘impartiality’ upsets.
For all sorts of reasons, some of which are understandable others not so much, the BBC of 2023 - unlike the BBC of the 1990s and 2000s - really doesn’t feel in a position to do any of that and reaches instead, for its good old friend ‘balance'.
There’s your second elephant.
