photo credit: zawtowers

When it comes to reporting the news, everyone wants to be seen as impartial. Ask someone what that means, however, and they’ll probably just offer you a synonym – unbiased, objective, neutral. But dig deeper into the meaning of impartiality and two things become clear. One is that you can be impartial in very different ways. The other is that when it comes to the quest to remain objective, most major media outlets are suffering from serious – arguably disabling – misconceptions as to how the news should be reported. As recent events have once again highlighted, the globally admired British Broadcasting Corporation is no exception.

On Wednesday the BBC trust – the body that oversees the corporation – decided to censure the Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, for breaching the BBC’s guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. Now when it comes to the Middle East, the corporation is no stranger to controversy. Back in January, in the aftermath of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, it refused to broadcast a Gaza humanitarian appeal for fear of losing its “neutrality”. But whereas that was merely a case of shameful, disgusting, vomit-inducing kowtowing to lobbyists – specifically the pro-Israel lobby (whose pernicious influence I discuss in more detail in my post “Modern day McCarthyism: Victory for the poisonous “Pro-Israel” lobby”) – the reasoning behind the decision to censure Bowen raises further questions about how the BBC views the role of news reporting. As reported by the Independent: (emphasis mine)

Bowen was censured for a piece which he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline “Six days that changed the Middle East”, attempting to give context to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysing the events of the 1967 Six Day War. The Middle East editor referred to “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier”. He wrote that Israel showed a “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” and that its generals felt that they were dealing with “unfinished business”, left over from the 1948 War of Independence.

The committee ruled that Bowen’s reporting partially breached the BBC’s rules on accuracy and impartiality: “Readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war,” it said. “It was not necessary for equal space to be given to the other arguments, but … the existence of alternative theses should have been more clearly signposted.”

This is a very odd critique. Had “alternative theses” indeed been “more clearly signposted”, then Bowen wouldn’t have been doing a piece that was trying to analyse the events of the six day war in order to provide context for the present day conflict. He would instead have been writing a piece on what different people say about the events of the Six Day War, which is a very different kettle of fish altogether.  As for the criticism that a reader might come away thinking that there was only one sensible interpretation, well, wasn’t that the point of the piece? If you’re trying to ascertain the causes of a war then, by definition, the conclusion you come to will be what you consider the most sensible interpretation. It undermines your piece somewhat if you then mention that an opposing view is just as sensible.

So clearly these criticisms of a thoughtful and vastly knowledgeable reporter are illogical and collapse under the lightest of scrutiny. So far, so BBC management. It would be easy to simply write this off as an ill-thought out attempt to placate the pro-Israel lobby (in which case they haven’t succeeded, as following the Trust’s decision the  Zionist Federation of Great Britain told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the ruling was proof of BBC “bias” and that Bowen’s position was “untenable”. They were half right.)  However, once it is put in context with the general consensus on the role of news reporting it becomes clear that this is about more than simple, base fealty to special interests. It’s about the standard of news-gathering that we want from our reporters – in particular those who cover areas of controversy where the objective truth is, if it exists at all, buried under a sea of falsehoods.

Basically, it comes down to this: you can conceive of impartiality in news reporting in two ways. On the one hand, you can take it to mean that if two parties disagree, then a report should give equal weight to the arguments of each and imply they have equal strength. Alternatively, you can accept that if an impartial assessment of the situation leads to the conclusion that one side has the better of the argument then a reporter has a responsibility to give more weight to it.

The first conception of impartiality is frequently taken to ludicrous extremes. Across much of America’s media, for example, this results in a “he said/she said” mentality whereby political news is reported by quoting the views of a Democrat and then quoting the views of a Republican and leaving it at that – even when the views of one of the parties is demonstrably and clearly factually incorrect . I’ll let you work out for yourself which of the two parties this standard of reporting normally benefits. Though the pathetically subservient US media is an extreme example,  the BBC has once again shown that it too is prone to falling for this myopic view of impartiality.

The second conception of impartiality – rationally assessing the situation to see if one side has a better argument and if so then giving more weight to said argument – might well sound suspiciously like saying “be as subjective and biased as you like as long as you stick to the facts”. But it isn’t. This is because there is no divide between some-one’s subjective opinion and the objective fact. Even the most basic of statements has a subjective spin on it. I might assert that grass is green, but my colour-blind friend might have something to say on the matter.  When it comes to a thorny issue like the Middle East, the problem stops being philosophical and starts to be very real: even simple facts like place names become subjects of debate. Do you use the Hebrew or the Arab name to describe an illegal West Bank settlement?  In this way even the basic factual framework of your reporting becomes an indication of your beliefs (note as well my use of the word “illegal” in the previous sentence).

Once we accept this, it’s easy to see how the fear of bias is an illusory one. Indeed, to get to the truth – to be truly impartial – you have to go beyond the “he said/she said” and weigh up the arguments for yourself until you come to what you can feel comfortable calling the truth of the matter.  How well you do this is what matters, not whether or not you are you “biased”. The better a reporter you are the closer you come to the truth, even if you can never really attain it. Jeremy Bowen is a very good reporter. His Middle East reporting comes very close. The fact that the BBC Trust cannot see this shows how very far away they are from grasping the fundamentals of good journalism.