The impartial approach to impartiality

Roger Mosey considers impartiality in the BBC and the media more widely.

The BBC has had another of its grisly periods, contriving to turn a stupid mistake in a Panorama programme into a corporation-wide crisis that cost the jobs of the director-general and the director of news. Now it faces a multi-billion dollar legal challenge from the President of the United States, and in the UK its future funding is under review by the government. Its enemies are closing in.

But in these dangerous and disputatious times, the case for one of the core purposes of the BBC – its impartiality – seems to me to be stronger than ever. The corporation proclaims in its public documents that ‘impartiality is fundamental to the BBC’s purpose’ and notes that it is enshrined in the BBC’s Royal Charter; and it was highlighted again by the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy when she launched the government’s Green Paper.

Impartiality is, at its simplest, a commitment not to take sides: to be a place where fact-based debates can take place without pre-judgement. So of course you would want public broadcasters – and academics and others relying on the country’s trust and often on its funding too – to be honest and accurate and fair, and all those other noble adjectives. The question is whether it is possible in the digital world we’re now in, and how it works in practice.

For the BBC, nobody has ever made a convincing case that it has a party political bias. The polling has shown a tendency to think that any bias is pro-government, whether that’s Labour or Conservative, and that is probably inevitable given that ministers get more airtime and are running the country. But part of the recent controversy has been about an alleged BBC worldview, which tends to be liberal on social issues and rather uncomprehending of the forces which produced Brexit and now the surge in support for Reform.

My personal view is that there’s some truth in this: metropolitan newsrooms populated by young graduates are not necessarily in tune with the voters in Brecon or Bradford. Under its former director-general Lord Hall the BBC took the unintentionally revealing step of signing up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme – a decision which Hall’s successor Tim Davie rightly reversed as threatening to impartiality.

Also nibbling away at the traditional concept of impartiality are the generational changes in our society. Identity politics sometimes makes assertions that are explicitly said not to be open to challenge; and voters prioritise their beliefs, and what they want to be true, over the evidence. This was visible in the referendum on membership of the EU and its aftermath, where the true believers on both sides had an emotional intensity that claimed to turn every single fact their way. Compounding this is the way that digital media encourages us to sit within our comfort zone – to surround ourselves by people who agree with us, and to work ourselves up into a froth of indignation about the ridiculousness of the counterarguments.

But that is why we should double down on a commitment to impartiality. I believe there is a considerable middle ground in this country where people are interested in evidence, and they want to hear it from organisations they trust. They also find it interesting to hear a wide range of views rather than only their own. Even for those who are on the partisan wings, it is surely better to be guided by fact than by supposition – and policy is best devised on the basis of what is needed and what will work.

This points to what needs to accompany impartiality. Nandy has suggested ‘accuracy’ should sit alongside impartiality, and there is certainly an obligation to discover and assert what is true. That can sometimes be uncomfortable for some constituencies. Let me, with appropriate trepidation, spell out some of the challenges. In the Europe debate, Leavers need to accept that there was identifiable economic damage but Remainers have to acknowledge that the UK has more freedom of manoeuvre outside membership of the EU. In the trans debate, scientific orthodoxy is that human biological sex is immutable. On climate change, it is happening – and the debate should be about the response, not the underlying science.

In other words, impartiality isn’t about letting everyone in the UK say anything that comes into their head live on the BBC without any challenge. It’s not about treating facts and opinion as the same things. But if we get it right, it’s about a common understanding of issues sitting alongside a diversity of thought about solutions.

This matters because we can see the malign actors: the purveyors of disinformation and misinformation, some of them encouraged by foreign states. We should also put little trust in the tech moguls of Silicon Valley who are taking decisions that shape our lives but do not care two hoots about the democracies of the rest of the world. There is a split in the road ahead in which we can end up with falsehoods and global commercialisation and nothing we can truly trust, or we retain an anchor of UK-based organisations which want to tell the truth and have no ideological or financial pressures which subvert them. That is why the debate about impartiality matters.

By Roger Mosey, Former Master, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.