BBC’s ‘impartiality’ report ignores the war
Peter Wilby in MediaGuardian demolishes the BBC’s awful report on impartiality last week, which is blind, in Wilby’s words, to the fact that: “If ever there was an example of a lapse from balance, open-mindedness and rigour, it occurred in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the BBC accepted Saddam had WMDs, despite former UN inspectors saying he had been fully disarmed.”
Impartiality is a good thing to aspire to, but almost impossible to achieve, not least because philosophers don’t agree on what it is. According to a BBC Trust report published last week, it “involves a mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance, even-handedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth”. The trust assessed the BBC’s programmes - drama, comedy, even the weather, as well as news and current affairs - against these criteria and found them sometimes wanting. Which, given the severity of the test and the quantity of the BBC’s output (408,415 hours a year), is hardly surprising.
It is impossible to imagine any newspaper conducting a similar self-examination, still less publishing it. Even achieving accuracy, etc, in covering the report proved beyond the press. “BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’”, shouted a Sunday Times headline. The phrase “culture of bias” does not appear in the report. The papers reply that the BBC is different because everyone is compelled to pay for it. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not absolve mass circulation newspapers from responsibilities to be, for example, truthful, rigorous and transparent, particularly in news reports. With rare exceptions, their response to any lapse - such as the News of the World phone-tapping affair - is to sweep it rapidly under the carpet.
An even more egregious example of press hypocrisy followed the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark last year. The BBC, frequently accused of cravenly appeasing Muslim sensitivities, reproduced them on Newsnight. No paper would touch them. Again, several British papers have portrayed the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a Soviet-style dictator because he withdrew a licence to broadcast on public airwaves from a channel that supported an attempted coup. (It can still transmit on satellite and cable.) Yet columnists demand the BBC be similarly punished for non-violent promulgation of “political correctness”.
The British right, vociferously supported by the Mail, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press, is trying to pull off the same trick as the American right: to convince the public that key sections of the media are gripped by a leftwing conspiracy. The BBC Trust shows the campaign is succeeding. Its report, though nuanced and thoughtful, is itself biased. Its examples of possible lapses from impartiality include the failure to feature more about Ukip in the 2005 election campaign, lack of airtime given to “socially authoritarian” views, uncritical support for the Make Poverty History campaign, general prevalence of “politically correct” views, and over-representation of ethnic minorities. Even support for “saving the planet” is apparently thought controversial. There is brief mention of the generous airtime given to religion but that is treated as unproblematic. The report focuses on a supposed “liberal” bias.
Yet different complaints against the BBC are made by, for example, John Pilger, the Medialens website and the Glasgow Media Group. These allege a bias towards a western, free market view of the world, so that, for example, the corporation fails to tell the whole truth about US and British military interventions. If ever there was an example of a lapse from balance, open-mindedness and rigour, it occurred in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the BBC accepted Saddam had WMDs, despite former UN inspectors saying he had been fully disarmed. None of this is mentioned in the BBC Trust report. Nor is Top Gear which, many would say, glorifies reckless driving and carries anti-green messages.
The report, however, is correct to say that achieving impartiality (or rather the appearance of it) is more complex than it was. Once, it was enough to give the major political parties equal airtime. Now, the parties cluster on a consensual centre ground and the big divisions in public opinion are as much cultural as political: religion, ethnicity, sexuality, abortion, for example. The report argues the BBC should not “close down debate”. It should achieve “a balance of opinion across the intellectual spectrum”, and should not exclude unfashionable views.
This is surely right, but it is tricky territory. According to a poll last year, more than a third of Britons believe in creationism or intelligent design. Do they count as part of the “intellectual spectrum”? Do the climate change deniers? The Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has accused the BBC of disenfranchising “countless millions” of Britons who don’t subscribe to its world view. But the BBC addresses a worldwide audience, in which countless millions would agree with Pilger on most issues rather than with Dacre. Should their views get more airtime?
Impartiality is of its nature elusive. The BBC is one of the few British brands that still commands worldwide admiration, it is a significant export earner and we should all be proud of it. The supposedly patriotic rightwing press is doing it incalculable damage and the journalists and editors responsible should, if I may borrow their own language, hang their heads in shame.
