Probably not, but the problem isn’t impartiality it’s the politics of impartiality

On November 9th, the director general of The BBC, Tim Davie, along with the head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned. Their resignation was in response to a report published in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, that claimed a BBC News programme, Panorama, edited a speech by President Donald Trump to make it appear as though he encouraged the Capital Riot. 

Queue predictable outrage.

MP’s came out saying that the BBC has questions to answer. President Trump has threatened to sue The BBC for 1 billion Dollars for defamation. This story is unlikely to go away anytime soon. 

Underlying all this drama are questions about whether The BBC is impartial in how it reports the news. However, while listening to The BBC Radio 4 news on the morning of November 10th, it became clear that there are a few different stories playing out here. 

Story one. The BBC has a systemic “chronic” bias in its reporting. 

Story two: There is a conflict going on within The BBC about how it operates. One report described the situation as a coup.

Story three: There is a debate about how The BBC should respond to accusations of this kind. In other words, that when the BBC becomes the news, as opposed to reporting the news, its own media strategy is terrible. 

Each of these stories is important in different ways, and they overlap. 

Story one concerns the legitimacy of The BBC as a news reporting agency. Story two deals with the possible tensions that exist between established and highly qualified reporters and the political appointees that contribute to The BBC’s governance. Story three concerns public relations in times of crisis. Underlying all of these is another, (fourth), story about funding. Should the public, through the license fee, continue to fund The BBC? If so, how and how much? Relatedly, does The BBC offers value to the taxpayer. The news section of The BBC is a big part of this equation around “value.”

I’m not going to comment on how The BBC is governed. Nor will I speak directly to the funding question or the public relations issue. Rather, I want to focus on the fuel for this and previous scandals. Is The BBC an impartial news organization? 

The answer is both yes, and no. 

That’s not an academic response designed to avoid a real answer. It’s because of a misunderstanding about what neutrality and/or impartiality mean. 

One of the benefits of the traditional (or legacy) news media is that they operate according to generally recognizable guidelines so that what is reported can be trusted to be accurate. Or at least, they are expected to. 

Of course, not all mainstream media is the same. Fox News is pretty terrible at offering impartial or objective reporting. Everyone knows that different sources report the news differently. Think right-wing versus left-wing news, and where you would go for each. 

The BBC, a publicly funded news provider, needs to operate independently of partisan viewpoints. Their Editorial Guidelines write that impartiality is, 

“fundamental to the BBC’s purpose and is enshrined in the BBC’s Charter. It means not favouring one side over another and reflecting all relevant sides of the debate. It means not taking sides, reflecting all relevant strands of public debate and challenging them with consistent rigour. Impartiality is key to a relationship of trust with audiences, that they know the BBC is not being influenced by any personal or other agenda in what it chooses to broadcast or publish or in how it covers stories and that it seeks to include a wide range of views on any given topic.”

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The BBC does include a few important caveats to this definition. They acknowledge that impartiality will require “judgement.” The guidelines also state that being impartial does not mean “detachment from fundamental democratic values.” 

There is a lot that is sensible about this framing of impartiality. Not taking sides being the hallmark of impartial reporting. 

However, there is a problem. It is certainly possible to offer something close to impartial reporting. But impartiality is not necessarily the same as not taking sides.

In any story there will likely be competing interpretations. Some of these will be more accurate than others but accuracy does not mean impartiality. How different sides are reported, as well as which sides are even considered, are judgements which can either be political or have political consequences.

During the Brexit campaign The BBC would give the impression during its reporting that there were sound economic reasons for both positions. However, very few economists believed that to be the case, with most arguing that voting to leave the EU was an act of economic self-harm, even sabotage. The BBC had to report on what “Leave” were claiming, but in the process they created a false equivalence between the two positions. That’s not impartial reporting, it’s creating a false equivalence.

In times of increased partisanship and ideological division, the appearance of not taking sides becomes even harder. That’s because information is always interpreted, and interpretations are not value neutral. The more that political views shape our sense of identity and community, the more likely we are to recognize the validity of claims when they align or correspond to what we already think.1

Judgements need to be made about what information to privilege and how to present that information. The Brexit example is an easy case to see how a false narrative was presented about the economic merits of leaving, but as a yes/no referendum it also gave The BBC little choice but to present a dichotomous story. 

Yet, framing issues in either/or terms has political consequences. Presenting the news as though stories are dichotomous, with two sides against each other, can lead to false narratives, like it did with the economic merits of leaving the EU. Climate change is another example. Jere we can see how what side is taken to represent the “other” side is not impartial. 

There is no real debate about whether or not the climate is changing because of human influence. The debate is about the speed with which the climate is changing. But if one side argues that the climate is changing because of human activity, the logical other side to that argument would be that humans are not influencing climate change. That’s false. Indeed, creating these kinds of false dichotomies has been a tactic of the Tobacco industry as well as Big Oil, all designed in order to highlight uncertainty, suggesting doubt in places where there really isn’t any. It is an important issue that concerns on how science works, and the ability to use the scientific method against itself.2 The philosopher Bruno Latour reflected on this point in an essay where he asked about his own contribution to possibly undermining faith in science. 

Another concern that follows from these examples is how reporting the other side can be performative by offering a voice and legitimacy to an unwarranted position.

The disproportionate amount of time that Nigel Farage is give airtime is one interesting example of this problem. The more airtime he gets, the more he becomes recognized as an important (and possibly legitimate) political leader, and so on. It could be that the news is simply giving him more airtime because the reporters and editors feel that doing so is to reflect his increasing popularity. But that ignores the performative character of reporting. 

The NYTimes even ran a piece discussing how they report on President Trump in light of these types of considerations.

Reporting can end up creating a story instead of merely reporting one. Indeed, selecting what to report is important. That’s not a new insight. I remember hearing all about it as an undergraduate student going to watch the documentary “Manufacturing Consent.” A different take is Sheldon Wolin’s discussion about “inverted totalitarianism” which explores the role of the news media in undermining democratic society. The underlying problem in all of this is that the idea of an impartial or non-bias news media assumes something that doesn’t exist: that it is possible to report political events from a position of apolitical objective neutrality. 

The BBC’s definition of impartiality uses the phrase “all sides” instead of both sides, but the underlying premise is that it is possible to produce apolitical interpretations of political events. Hence The BBC’s point about not being influenced by outside agendas. 

The way political pundits and politicians often discuss this point makes it sound as though the issue is right-wing or left-wing bias. The LBC (in London) solves this problem by having both right- and left-wing commentators. Apparently that provides balance. 

Except it doesn’t. It provides a balanced view from two different political perspectives. However ideological balance does not mean accuracy in either reporting or analysis. 

The reality is that news stories offer specific interpretations of a specific event. It is possible for some interpretations to be false, hence Carl Sagan’s baloney detection toolkit. But it is also possible for multiple interpretations to be true at the same time. 

Nevertheless, there are still going to be some interpretations that are simply more accurate than others. 

Returning to the issue around The BBC Panorama scandal, it is true that Trump was an especially important figure in encouraging the riot on Capital Hill. It is also true that he did not directly tell people to attack the Capital Building. That second truth does not negate his role in encouraging the riot.

The impartial question is really about whether or not it is possible to look at the evidence and, all things being equal, come to a similar conclusion? That does not mean liking the conclusion. It means recognizing the processes under which information is deemed relevant and assessed, and having a clear grasp of how that information is presented. 

Moreover, reporting — in the U.K. at least — is framed not by some vision of impartiality meaning everyone gets equal attention or equal measure. The regulatory framework in the U.K. refers to due impartiality, with due meaning that, “adequate or appropriate to the subject and nature of the programme. So ‘due impartiality’ does not mean an equal division of time has to be given to every view, or that every argument and every facet of every argument has to be represented.” Impartiality has always involved making a judgement, and judgements are never value neutral.

Reporting always involves judgements, not just about what to report, but how to present the information and what to push back on. 

Going back to the Capital riot, was Trump complicit in producing that outcome? By any reasonable measure he was. He sowed doubts about the integrity of the election. He urged his supporters to march to Capital Hill. But he did not specifically call for a violent attack on the Capital Building. The judgement is about how to describe his encouragement and incitement without suggesting direct causality. 

The point about impartiality has become a cudgel to wield in a partisan age. What the right-wing media and related political leaders have figured out is that if you can accuse the other side of ideological bias, your own side is, by contrast, more “accurate.” But that’s nonsense. It’s also paradoxical because the logic means that one political perspective is inherently more accurate. However, that can only be the case if we assume that accuracy is contingent on political perspective. And if that is true, accuracy is not because of the “facts” (whatever they might be) but because of political values. So much for impartiality. 

My point is that any reporting of the news is always going to be filtered or interpreted through political values, and these values shape what is reported. Think of it this way: if reporting news is also creating news, there can be no impartiality. Populists like Farage and Trump know this point very well. 

The concern around impartiality sustains a false narrative about objective facts, when all the news can ever do is offer interpretations about what is happening at any given time. At every point in the construction of a news story are judgements. What story is more important? What words to use? Which evidence is more compelling (or more accurate)? How to frame the issue? What questions should we ask? Who should be interviewed or used as a source? And so on. 

Impartiality means being able to demonstrate the plausibility of one interpretation over another, without bluster, falsehoods, or deception, and without the interpretation being informed by, and supportive of a particular partisan or ideological vantage point. Put differently, it’s about honesty, integrity and transparency. It may even mean taking a moral stand. Impartiality is really about making judgements, and judgements can never be entirely value neutral.

The most important statement in the BBC editorial guidelines is not about impartiality. It’s about the values that inform their judgements, which speaks to an agenda that corresponds to protecting particular features of liberal democracy. Instead of debating impartiality or bias, we should be discussing democratic values and how these values inform news reporting. That’s why Trump is going after the BBC (his anti-democratic tendencies) and why Farage doesn’t like the BBC either. 

I’m all for discussing honest reporting. But let’s be honest. These scandals are not about that. It would be a welcome relief if they actually were.

1 I’ve discussed this in a co-authored article on fake news. 

2 I have explored the politics of the scientific method and its relevance in sowing doubt here.