UK: BBC bias: is the broadcaster really impartial?

BBC
Credits 
Getty Images
Alt Text 
BBC

Director-general says public perception of broadcaster’s impartiality has “weakened in recent years”

In Depth
Friday, March 29, 2019 - 3:28pm

The BBC has announced that it is taking steps to improve its impartiality as a news source, amid claims by its director-general that public perception of the broadcaster as an unbiased observer has “weakened in recent years”.

Announcing the BBC’s latest annual plan today, Tony Hall said there was a “need to stand up for impartiality” in the coming years, adding that the broadcaster’s “responsibility to reflect and represent every part of the UK and make sure all voices are heard has never been more crucial” in a time “when the country feels divided and fragmented”.

“We regularly track people’s perceptions of BBC impartiality, so we know that – like other organisations – they have weakened in recent years,” he wrote in the plan.

The Guardian reports that the “impartiality of the corporation’s news output has come under attack from all sides in recent years, especially following the Brexit referendum”, and that it “has been at the focus of discussions over whether the national broadcaster should be giving airtime to individuals who represent extreme views in the name of balance”. 

Media watchdog Ofcom, in an independent review of the BBC in 2018, painted a mixed picture of the corporation. It revealed that more than seven in ten people surveyed “rated the BBC highly for providing high-quality, trustworthy, and accurate news” but also noted that the “most common type of complaint that Ofcom received about BBC content during 2017/18 was about the alleged bias of BBC programmes”.

So is the BBC biased?

What is impartiality?

According to BBC guidelines, the broadcaster has a responsibility to “do all we can to ensure controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality in our news and other output dealing with matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy”, adding: “But we go further than that, applying due impartiality to all subjects.”

In practice, this means a commitment to “reflecting a wide range of opinion across our output as a whole and over an appropriate timeframe so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented”.

However, significantly, the corporation retains the right to exercise “editorial freedom to produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate, as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so”.

Brexit bias in the spotlight

Few things have brought the BBC’s claims of impartiality under more scrutiny than its coverage of the 2016 Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

In the Radio Times, journalist Raymond Snoddy writes that the BBC came under attack “from both the right and the left” over what critics called its “tit-for-tat news coverage”.

As an example of what he calls a “phoney balance”, former BBC journalist Professor Ivor Gaber cites an occasion when “1,280 business leaders signed a letter to The Times backing UK membership of the EU”, a story that was supposedly “balanced” by a brief quote arguing the opposite from a single entrepreneur, Sir James Dyson.

As far back as 2005, the BBC was accused of failing in its duty of impartiality and “promoting an institutional pro-European Union bias in a damning report that it commissioned”, The Times reports.

Journalist Sir Simon Jenkins referenced these claims in an article in The Guardian in the wake of the referendum, in which he defended BBC coverage of the vote itself as balanced. However, he said the broadcaster could not undo the impact of “years of brazen pro-EU bias”.

In fact, according to Jenkins, then BBC Director General Tony Hall “went round the London dinner circuit wailing that BBC balance had ‘lost us the election’” because “it had given too much credibility to leave”.

Does the BBC give a platform to extremists?

For those on the left of the political spectrum, lending credibility to figures and causes they deem extreme is a common gripe against the BBC.

In an article for The Conversation, Dr Chris Allen of the University of Leicester addressed criticism levelled at the broadcaster over its supposed role in the “normalisation” of alt-right and far-right discourse since the rise in populist sentiment exemplified by the Brexit vote and the election of President Donald Trump.

These incidents have included the “former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to discuss the release of Tommy Robinson”, while Ezra Levant, Robinson’s former employer at the Canadian far-right website Rebel Media, appeared on BBC 5 Live’s Breakfast Show.

Criticism has also been levelled at the BBC for its decision to give airtime to hard-line Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary.

The broadcaster came under fire again in November 2018 after Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon pulled out of a BBC-hosted conference in Edinburgh after learning of its decision to invite Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon to speak there. Bannon has “championed far-right nationalist parties across Europe since exiting the White House in August 2017”, says The Independent.

Robert Peston, who served for nine years as BBC business and economics editor before moving to ITV, has been highly critical of this element of the BBC’s approach to debates, telling reporters in October: “Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people, one of whom says the world is flat and the other one says the world is round. That is not balanced, impartial journalism.”

So is the BBC biased?

A study carried out by researchers at Cardiff University, who analysed BBC news coverage from 2007 and 2012, concluded that conservative opinions received more airtime than progressive ones. However, those findings contradict a 2013 report by the Centre for Policy Studies think tank which claimed that the corporation is biased towards the left.

On balance, the evidence supports the BBC’s claim of impartiality, albeit with occasional missteps. In its 2018 report on the BBC, broadcasting regulator Ofcom examined 69 complaints of alleged bias and concluded that none were in breach of the due impartiality requirements of the Broadcasting Code.

However, bias is often heavily subjective and thus difficult to measure. What is certain is that more and more British viewers are losing their faith in the BBC as the high watermark of impartial public service broadcasting.

Ofcom noted in its 2018 report on news consumption that only 61% of those surveyed agreed that the BBC News was impartial, lower than the ratings given to ITV News (68%) and Sky News (64%).

UK: BBC bias: is the broadcaster really impartial? UK: BBC bias: is the broadcaster really impartial? Reviewed by Shahid Karimi on March 30, 2019 Rating: 5

No comments:

Powered by Blogger.