FROM BBC TO GB NEWS: CAN THE MEDIA BE IMPARTIAL?
Filmed at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023, this excellent panel gets to grips with impartiality. Does it still exist, is it worth reclaiming or a dated idea and where does this leave objectivity and truth?
Earlier this year, for the first time ever, Match of The Day aired without a host after Gary Lineker was removed from the airwaves by the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie. Lineker was said to be in breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines for tweeting that the language surrounding the government’s new asylum policy was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s’.
Others say the problem is not presenters lacking objectivity or young journalists lacking training, but rather the rules themselves. Does it make sense for Ofcom to try to apply a broadcast code written in a different period dominated by the BBC and ITV in an era of new independent channels? Is it sensible or even possible for an individual to insist that organisations show true impartiality? And ultimately, what’s at stake if we ditch the idea of impartiality altogether?
The speakers are:
Liam Deacon- consultant Pagefield communications, former journalist & TV producer
Iain Macwhirter - columnist, The Times and Spectator; author, Disunited Kingdom: how Westminster won a referendum but lost Scotland
Helen Searls - chief operating officer, Feature Story News
Baroness Stowell - chair, Communications & Digital Select Committee
The chair is: Max Sanderson - senior editor, audio, Guardian
This debate was filmed by volunteers working with Worldwrite. Please help ensure the charity is able to edit a further 32 debates by hitting the THANKS button above and donating whatever you can afford.
Пікірлер: 8
The problem is News is entertainment and profit driven.
There should just be at least one place that you can go for just the facts
The woman asked about facts and non-facts being reported on and how do we deal with that… the response didn’t really answer the question but seemed to uphold the deluded feelings of fantasists.
Glad the panel completely ignored the man near the end asking how we can legitimise cancelling people, limit their job prospects and offering subjective opinions on people as if he is the only moral arbiter of such things.
"People will die because of the BBC." -- Tony Benn during an interview (his final interview?) with Afshin Rattansi
If the BBC is supposed to represent the broad demographic of the UK, it fails. It doesn't represent working-class voices - it panders to them with low-brow content. I've nothing against low-brow content, or the BBC providing it, but it does seem to be the case that middle-class commissioning editors assume that such content ticks 'the working-class representation' box, when what we require is to hear the mainstream political views (diverse as they are, of course) of working-class people reflected across BBC content. The BBC is obsessed with a diversity of a particular kind, which obsessions are actually not at all mainstream. The BBC seems less concerned with reflecting diverse opinions, than educating/indoctrinating viewers into a proscribed weltanschauung. There are perfectly mainstream views - on immigration or gender identity ideology, for example - which the BBC will actively prevent being aired, presumably because they believe such views are 'harmful' by their own DEI yardsticks. I don't subscribe to everything GBNews has to say either, but I welcome its voice within the media landscape; without it there would be no balance at all.
@worldwrite
4 ай бұрын
Good point re GB news. Surely too as some of the speakers suggest the BBC should reflect objectivity & truth (contested of course) as best understood at any one time, which seems to have gone out the window.