From Theory to Practice

How to Assess and Apply Impartiality in News and Current Affairs

Leon Barkho

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781841507262
• eBook ISBN: 9781783202294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Theory to Practice is the first scholarly look at the possibilities and challenges of impartial and objective journalism in our digitized media world. This volume brings together contributions from editors at premiere news outlets like Reuters and the BBC to discuss how to assess, measure and apply impartiality in news and current affairs in a world where the impact of digital technologies is constantly changing how news is covered, presented and received. In this changing media environment, impartial journalism is as crucial as it ever was in traditional media, and this book offers an essential analysis of how to navigate a media milieu in which technology has sharply reduced the gatekeeping role news gatherers and producers used to have in controlling content flow to audiences.

 

PART I

Theories

Chapter 1

How mainstream media can learn from philosophical deliberations of impartiality

Leon Barkho

This chapter provides a synopsis of how impartiality is viewed in disciplines other than media, i.e. philosophy and law, and how useful the deliberations in these areas might be for journalists. These deliberations are supplemented with a few cases and stories which the writer believes have a direct bearing on impartiality issues, and the general criteria comprising impartiality as a journalistic concept. The chapter first reviews how impartiality is defined and explained in the media, and whether media broadcasters like the BBC and the ABC rely on philosophical deliberations of the concept in their guidelines. Then it shows how important the concept is for philosophers, especially in their deliberations of the nature of science and social reality out there. Thereafter, it provides some parallels and differences between impartiality practitioners in both the media and the judiciary. Section 5 presents a summary of the major types of impartiality that are the focus of philosophical deliberations. The last section concludes the study, focusing on the major impartiality criteria from a philosophical perspective.

What is impartiality?

Before delving into philosophical deliberations of impartiality, particularly in judicial practices, we need to explain what the concept means in terms of news and current affairs. As we do so, it is important to remember that impartiality as a notion is viewed differently by different scholars, journalists and news organizations, and as John Lloyd (2009) points out, ‘No concept in journalism is more contested than impartiality’.

We can start with the dictionary meaning of the term. Although some may see this as unhelpful, the lexicon specifies at least some of the most fundamental elements of what impartiality should include. Being impartial, according to Hornby (2002), does not mean supporting one person or group more than another, nor showing favour towards or against one group of people or one’s own opinion for personal reasons, nor making unfair judgments. The closest dictionary definition to the journalistic notion of impartiality is perhaps the definition by Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) which states that ‘[t]he quality of being impartial’ means ‘freedom from bias or favoritism; disinterestedness; equitableness; fairness; as, impartiality of judgment, of treatment, etc.’

But it is important to note here that media outlets, including broadcasters with a claim to impartiality, fail to give workable definitions. Broadcasters pursuing impartiality suggest several traits for the concept, and then attempt to explain them through specific guidelines and sometimes with examples on how to translate them into news content. Avoiding straightforward definitions, both the BBC and the ABC (Australian Public Corporation) give what they believe are the basic components of impartiality. The BBC’s most comprehensive report on the subject, ‘From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century’, says impartiality ‘involves a mixture’ of twelve key elements or labels: ‘accuracy, balance, context, distance, evenhandedness, fairness, objectivity, openmindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth’ (BBC Trust 2007: 5). In practice, however, practitioners make reference to only a few of these components. For instance, in assessing the impartiality of its own coverage of the four UK nations, the BBC focuses on issues of accuracy, context and balance (BBC Trust 2008). While the BBC impartiality report dwells at length on each of these labels, it is important to note that some of them overlap, duplicate and confuse readers as is the case with the broadcaster’s effort to distinguish between components like balance and even-handedness, which basically mean the same thing. Other broadcasters attribute fewer elements to impartiality: the ABC, for instance, recognizes only five: ‘accuracy, fairness, balance, context and no conflict or pre-judgment’ (ABC 2007: 5).

Media practitioners agree that some of the criteria attributed to impartiality do overlap. For instance, Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC World Service and Global News Division, says that notions like ‘impartiality or fairness or balance […] all these words are often used as if they were interchangeable’ (Sambrook 2004). The difference, in Sambrook’s opinion, is that an objective story, besides its being balanced, neutral, fair and impartial, must be supported by good evidence. Corresponding in definition and function are the two pivotal terms: impartiality and objectivity. These terms are often used interchangeably. For instance, Reuters makes no distinction between ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’ in its guidelines, using the terms interchangeably (Auchard 2013).

In his Objectivity in Journalism, Steven Maras, drawing on Allan (2010), sees objectivity as closely linked to impartiality. Objective reporting, he says, is ‘usually linked to other norms (such as neutrality), or replaced by the norm of impartiality with which it is regarded as “synonymous”’ (Maras 2013: 5). In his review of the BBC, Maras highlights the close ‘link between objectivity and the norm of impartiality promoted by the organization’ (2013: 216). In some countries, the term ‘objectivity’ borders on what ‘impartiality’ means for the BBC and other European media. In the US and Canada, objectivity is the concept which covers most of the impartiality components, like accuracy, truthfulness, fairness and balance, neutrality, unbiased reporting, value exclusion, disinterestedness, rejection of ideology, detachedness, etc. (cf. Blankenburg & Walden 1977; Anderson 1987; Mindich 1988; Kaplan 2002; Gabriele 2003; Cohen-Almagor 2008). It is worth noting that impartiality as a regime played almost the same role in the United States as that in Europe until the 1980s when the so-called ‘fairness doctrine’ – a regulatory government body that required broadcasters to provide balanced and objective coverage – was dissolved (Fiss 1990). (For further details see Chapters 2 and 4).

But not all European broadcasters and media proprietors are happy with the impartiality regime they are required to pursue. There has been serious lobbying by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch who see the European broadcasting impartiality regulations as ‘an impingement on freedom of speech and on the right of people to choose what kind of news to watch’ (Murdoch 2009: 12). Both have been lobbying to persuade governments to scrap the European ideology of public broadcasting and make room for the ‘market forces of ideas’ to rule in broadcasting as they do in print and online media. It is not clear whether European public broadcasters themselves are happy with the impartiality regimes they work under. James Harkin (2011) of The Independent says that even within the BBC there are voices who would want to get rid of the rulings. Harkin points to a ‘remarkable admission’ by the BBC’s former director general, Mark Thompson, in which he calls for the relaxing of impartiality guidelines governing public broadcasters like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 in Britain. Thompson, according to Harkin, even goes a step further by calling on the British government to free commercial broadcasters like Sky from its traditional impartiality rules, and allow them to air opinionated and partisan news. Thompson, adds Harkin, would even not mind having a channel like News Corp’s Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, in Britain.

But the divergent views, concepts and practices should not stand as a hindrance to research, and there should be an investigation into what it takes for the coverage of a communicative event to be called impartial. While generalizations are hard to obtain due to the divergent forces and powers affecting today’s media environment, our job as researchers should not be confined to the unpacking and criticizing of the social and discursive realities of news and current affairs discourse. In order to provide social, cultural and discursive options to improve the reporting of communicative events, our research must have some practical implications arrived at through dialogue, debate and inquiry, and covering actors from different sectors (Habermas 1973; Dewey 1981; Peirce 1992). Philosophers, media scholars and media practitioners concerned with the issue would usually agree that all, or at least some, of the impartiality components should be there for a standpoint to be impartial. The impartiality components philosophers dwell on are not so much different from the elements media scholars and practitioners talk about. For philosophers, impartiality hinges on four basic elements: consistency and universality, transparency, disinterestedness and equality (Stark 1997: 487). But before moving to what philosophers say about impartiality, let us first examine whether the media have ever considered leaning on philosophical deliberations in their discussions of the concept.

Media impartiality and philosophy

The media which value impartiality and strive to practice it across their platforms have their own sets of guidelines and procedures, which they believe will help their practitioners shun biased coverage, and produce what they see as impartial and objective content. But an examination of these guidelines will show that these media rarely make reference to philosophical deliberations of impartiality. The ABC (2007), for instance, believes that impartiality should only be explained within the media context, and without having the concept and its components grounded in law, where most of philosophical deliberations of impartiality take place. The only reference to philosophy is confined to a footnote where the ABC cites an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) into its flagship program, Four Corners, and specifically the one broadcast on 16 February 2004 entitled ‘Lords of the Forests’. In it, the ABC cites the authority as saying that philosophical deliberations, particularly of how impartiality is applied in judicial cases, ‘do contain useful models for formulating tests for impartiality, so long as they are properly adapted to the very different setting of media decision-making’ (ACMA 2004: 8).

In its investigation, the ACMA leans on the judiciary’s definition of ordinary audiences and their views as a measure to assess whether the ABC had made or failed to make a reasonable effort to be accurate, impartial and balanced when presenting the program. Similarly, the BBC takes into account its ordinary listeners, i.e. license fee payers, in assessing and measuring the impartiality of its news output. BBC guidelines highlight the role of ‘ordinary reader’, or ‘our audiences’, in examining whether news and current affairs programs are impartial. Audience research is part of all the reviews the BBC has conducted to assess its own impartiality. The BBC Trust ‘represents license fee payers in its oversight of the BBC. It listens to their opinions and expectations and uses them to inform its own decisions’ (2008). However, the corporation rarely leans on issues of judicial impartiality and related philosophical deliberations in its numerous impartiality reviews, of which it has done four so far: BBC coverage of business (2007); the devolved UK nations (2008); science (2012a); and coverage of the events known as the Arab Spring (2012b).

Another important aspect of ACMA investigations, and with relevance to this study, is the authority’s reliance on the dictionary meaning of the word ‘impartiality’. The authority does not have its own interpretation of impartiality. It adopts the explanation The Macquarie Dictionary provides for the word. It is worthwhile to compare ACMA’s stand on what impartiality means with that of the BBC Trust in its 2007 impartiality report: ‘Fortunately this Report is not required to provide an elaborate definition. That is best left to philosophers’ (BBC Trust 2007: 23). The BBC makes no effort in its more than 80-page report to shed any light on what philosophers think of impartiality and whether their deliberations can be of any use.

Subjective and objective impartiality

What is the social reality of journalism? Is there one journalistic social reality or several? Are there differences between the way, for instance, the social reality of journalism is viewed in North America and Europe? Scholarly debates about the social reality of journalism, as is the case with other social disciplines, revolve around notions of subjectivity versus objectivity, fact versus value, prescriptivism versus subjectivism, and positivism versus interpretivism. Aiming at objectivity and impartiality in reporting news and current affairs has traditionally placed journalism, particularly among its practitioners, as if it were part of natural sciences, where observers are given the capacity of separating fact from value while at the same time preventing personal or institutional influences from interfering in their work. This view has roots in North America, and especially among thinkers, analysts and practitioners for whom the application of positivist tendencies on social sciences will hopefully ‘display a development comparable to that manifested by the physical sciences in the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Newton’ (Hull 1943: 400). In this sense, reporters’ news output has to be accurate and precise because ‘[p]recision is an integral element of the criterion of testability’ (Merton 1949: 94). The inscription over the door to the journalism building at Stanford University that says, ‘Tell it as it is!’ is a reminder that objectivity or impartiality in journalism, in the positivistic sense, is possible, and that observers (reporters) and their institutions can shun their values, prejudices and outside influences and concentrate only on the ‘facts’ of the communication event they deal with.

But today there is an increasing number of thinkers who would question the foundations of a social science or journalism practice built on natural science principles, and would raise an eyebrow over Stanford University’s motto. For these thinkers, ‘There are no uninterpreted or brute facts that are simply “out there,” unaffected by our theoretical and conceptual schemes’ (Bernstein 1979: 20). Saying that we can report facts and nothing but facts borders on ‘hyperfactualism’ that sees collection of data as a means to arrive at ‘moral and prescriptive’ generalizations. The literature on media and journalism abounds with well-founded empirical generalizations, but they have proved insufficient to help us and our subjects to ‘tell it as it is’. Sticking to theory to uncover ‘facts’ of social reality will not alleviate the risk of investigators – researchers and journalists – advancing their own ideologies (Ryan 1972: 86).

‘Tell it as it is!’ from the view of philosophers who think that the realities or ‘facts’ of our world are ‘socially constructed’ is a ‘myth’. What journalists see as ‘facts’ are in fact ‘viewpoints’ and not universal truths. For instance, Heinz von Foerster, a top authority in social constructivism, commenting on ‘Tell it as it is!’ in a lecture at Stanford University, told his audience that there was nothing like ‘Tell it as it is!’ in the social world of journalism, but rather ‘It is as you tell it!’ (Foerster & Poerksen 2002: 99). But saying that objectivity in the positivist sense is hard to achieve does not mean that the social reality of journalism is the opposite in the solipsist sense (Thornton 2006). There is a lot in journalism which is not the creation of wildly f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The theory and practice of impartiality in news and current affairs
• Part I: Theories
• Chapter 1: How mainstream media can learn from philosophical deliberations of impartiality
• Chapter 2: Assessing, measuring and applying ‘public value tests’ beyond new media: Interpreting impartiality and plurality in debates about journalism standards
• Part II: Applications
• Chapter 3: PSYOPS or journalism? Norwegian information warfare in Afghanistan
• Chapter 4: A strategic ritual for all?
• Chapter 5: Web hate in social and mainstream media: ‘Why Anders Behring Breivik is (not) a hero’
• Chapter 6: Connecting the DOT: A protocol for the practice and perception of journalism
• Chapter 7: A guilty terrorist suspect? On membership categorization and presuppositions in news texts
• Chapter 8: Impartiality and autonomy: Preconditions for journalism in weak states
• Chapter 9: Towards a pragmatic view of impartiality
• Part III: Practicalities
• Chapter 10: Issues of impartiality in news and current affairs – some practical considerations
• Chapter 11: What are the new rules for reporting, sourcing, verifying, editing and publishing a social media world?
• List of contributors
• Back Page