WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Caroline Roddis calmly reflects on controlling bias in reporting, and concludes it is a good thing…

Just so long as it never applies to columnists like her

AS you’ll have undoubtedly seen, the topic of media bias has been—for tragic reasons—a subject of much debate since 6 October. At the centre of this is the BBC, who have been accused not only of failing to describe Hamas as a terrorist organisation in their coverage, but also of being biased against both sides in the unfolding conflict. According to a recent article in the Guardian: “The BBC is understood to have received more than 1,500 complaints relating to its coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict with complaints split almost evenly between those claiming its reporting has been biased against Israel and those saying it is biased against Palestinians.”

Is there any way, in this scenario, that the BBC could get it ‘right’? In a quest to decide whether the point of journalism is, in fact, to please none of the people none of the time—which you could argue the BBC has long made something of an art form—

I returned to the thought-provoking Frontlines of Journalism podcast, released earlier this year and presented by the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen. The topic of the podcast is the pursuit of truth, and Bowen, who has been accused of bias many times over his long career reporting on war zones, sets out his belief that impartiality isn’t necessarily compatible with providing balanced coverage.

Windows

As one of the guests on his first episode explains: “Balance is where you have two people with equal views both given equal time, and impartiality is when the journalist makes an active search to determine what is true. There’s a famous phrase, which I’ll censor slightly: if one person says it’s raining and the other person says it’s not, the journalist’s view isn’t to strike a balance, but to look out of the blinking window.”

On face value this makes perfect sense, and is probably invaluable advice if you want a career presenting the weather. Where it can get muddled, however, is where the answer isn’t a simple yes or no—and infinitely more so when conflicting belief systems are involved. Impartiality, the podcast contends, “doesn’t mean being neutral about basic moral values,” but how this works in a society which has difficulty differentiating the concepts of morality and ethics.

While you could contend there’s a shared moral code, a recent Telegraph article highlights the lack of any similar system of ethics. “Buy now, pay later provider Klarna has been accused of cutting off rifle suppliers from finance after declaring them unethical,” it begins. “Richard Stebbings, managing director of Centaur Target Sports, which sells Olympic-grade target air rifles, ammunition and specialised clothing, said the company has been cut off from Klarna’s services, which he used to offer finance on sporting accessories.”

Finances

The article quotes from the explanatory statement on Klarna’s website, which quickly descends into nonsense: “Some products can be categorised as products of dual use, meaning that they may have a legitimate use, but also an illegitimate use. When assessing partners providing products of dual use, Klarna will try to determine if its typical end customers intend to use the product in an illegitimate way and if the partner supports such use. Klarna shall make an overall assessment of the partner, its business practices, its conduct in general and its product portfolio.”

Given that most of you either have RFDs or know your way around licensing law, I don’t need to dwell on the many ways in which any so-called ‘assessment’ was clearly worthless, but I will briefly observe that a search on the Klarna app just now has offered me a wide variety of sharp and pointy objects for sale through their financing, all of which would serve quite well in any ‘dual use’ situation. Does Klarna really believe it’s unethical to enable the sale of rifles and sporting accessories, one wonders, or is this pandering to an audience for commercial gain?

Pheasants

The guest on that first podcast episode who explained the problems of balance in reporting, incidentally, is a journalist known to most of us: George Monbiot. And as most of us are also aware, where we might look out of the window and see someone enjoying a sport which offers myriad benefits to the community and conservation, Monbiot looks out of the window and sees a murderous toff.

In his recent opinion column—where I acknowledge he has carte blanche to say what he likes, as we columnists are mavericks who play by our own rules*—Monbiot asserts that pheasant shooting is “one of the bluntest expressions of class power in the United Kingdom” and later that “joining a shoot is a ticket to social acceptance in the upper echelons, and the signal to everyone else that you’ve made it.”

This should have made me furious, but I couldn’t help but chuckle as I imagined introducing him to my old syndicate, where at least half of the members were called Dave, and where most of us would have been bluntly told to use the tradesman’s entrance at the stately homes of those whom he asserts constitute the pheasant shooting community.

It’s a deliberately provocative piece—and a successful one at that, judging by the 390 impassioned comments on the online article from both sides— and one riddled with contentious statements like: “After each massacre, most of the dead pheasants, as there’s little demand for their meat, are dumped in ‘stink pits’” and “I suspect that the industrial killing of other animals has long helped inure the ruling classes to the industrial killing of human beings.”

In general reporting, of course, journalists are supposed to put their own beliefs aside, provide substantiated facts and allow the truth to shine through. In columns, it’s just an opinion—which by definition takes a side on a topical issue and is designed to provoke and/or entertain.

The idea of impartiality and the search for truth is an endlessly pure and beguiling one. But in a world where the idea of media legitimacy is in flux and where there’s so much seemingly ‘true’ content out there for us to consume, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to let the value of providing balance slip out of my cold, dead hands, for fear of denying people the right to be heard. That feels like it would be… immoral? Or unethical? GTN GTN

*Or, as our editors probably say, misfits who can’t cut it in real journalism and who should be grateful just to be employed…