Informed 11


different to someone atending a Brexit rally,” he said. Davie later issued a clarification, saying BBC journalists could atend Pride, provided they “do not get involved in maters which could be deemed political or controversial”. Others are apparently enthused by


the crackdown. Robbie Gibb, head of BBC political programmes until he leſt to work in Downing Street in 2017, was “delighted” by Davie’s impartiality drive. Yet Gibb is linked to GB News, a planned channel described (by Te Guardian 29 Aug 2020) as a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station. Te face of GB News is Andrew Neil,


who recently quit as the BBC’s chief political interviewer. He says it will target “a huge gap in the market” made up of the “vast number of British people who feel underserved and unheard by” existing news channels. GB News would test the due impartiality regulations overseen by Ofcom by emulating the presenter-led approach of American networks. Neil says that Ofcom has a “quite liberal” approach to impartiality and that Channel 4 News “clearly has a particular ideological position”. Ben De Pear, editor of Channel 4 News,


told NUJ Informed that this was not true. He said his programme’s journalistic vigour had caused it to be shunned by politicians from all major parties, notably Labour under its previous leader. “Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership thought we were too right-wing and too difficult in our interviews,” he says. “When politicians don’t like greater scrutiny, longer interviews and investigations, they tend to blame the organisation as being ideologically opposed to them. We are scrupulous in finding balance every single night and it’s harder when politicians won’t appear.” Te British broadcast news establishment also faces a challenge from Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, which plans a TV news channel that builds on its quarrelsome talkRADIO outlet. For four months it has nibbled at BBC


Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live with a new product, Times Radio, which gives an audio outlet to Te Times and Sunday Times news brands. Former editor of Te Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, who set up the station and co- presents its breakfast show, claims “the BBC historically gets itself in knots” over impartiality. “What you don’t want is automaton presenters who just ask questions as if they are somehow floating ephemerally above the fray. Nobody is above the fray! Coronavirus really brings that home. I understand the need for balance and not to proselytise about certain issues, but there’s nothing in the rules on impartiality that you can’t say ‘this happened to me yesterday and I feel this way about it’.”


Te idea that the BBC is failing is at odds with the audience engagement it has enjoyed during the pandemic. One


“Journalists at the BBC said they shouldn’t be prevented from speaking out on subjects they feel passionately about”


member of the BBC newsroom said the planned rivals were not a threat. “Te statistics don’t lie – the public are coming to us in unprecedented numbers because the BBC remains the medium of choice for most of Britain.”


But the BBC faces a perilous year, with


growing numbers of unpaid licence fees (encouraged by the prospect of decriminalisation of non-paying offenders), massive staff cuts and a yet-to- be-appointed chair who may not have the organisation’s best interests at heart. Troughout its history the BBC has


agonised over impartiality. In 1936, when the parliamentary commitee led by Lord Ullswater considered the first renewal of the BBC’s charter, it noted a journalistic tendency to focus on social change over


“orthodoxy and stability”, saying “the reiteration of what exists and is familiar is not so interesting as the exposition of what might be”.


In 2007 a BBC impartiality review led


by author and filmmaker, John Bridcut, sought modernisation by advocating a “wagon wheel” of opinions in place of the traditional leſt-right “see-saw”. Five years later, former ITV chief,


Stuart Prebble, was commissioned to examine the subject again. David Jordan, the BBC’s long-standing director of editorial policy and standards, told that review that people with “socially authoritarian” views felt excluded from the BBC. It was Jordan – recently involved in an impartiality controversy that saw presenter Naga Munchety censured for criticising Donald Trump – who oversaw the latest BBC impartiality guidelines. Prebble’s review, published in 2013, well before Brexit, challenged metropolitan liberal group-think at the BBC and said coverage of immigration needed to “seek out opinions which ‘people like us’ may find unpalatable”. Looking back now, Prebble told NUJ


Informed his review was not prescient but “complacent” and that the BBC and other mainstream outlets had been almost overwhelmed by the rapid polarisation of news. “I just feel that batle is lost and it is reflected up to, and including, no- platforming at universities and people going to news sources that will only say things they already agree with,” he says. “Te review was only seven years


ago and what has happened since is unrecognisable. I do think we failed to foresee, but I think we could be forgiven because I don’t think anybody could have foreseen, unless it was Aldous Huxley.” Even so, he says, the fractured news landscape does make the importance of the BBC greater than ever and the director general is right to keep struggling for impartiality. “I think the BBC just needs to do everything possible to hang on to that and the band needs to go on playing even as the waters lap around its ears,” he said.


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