Andrew Marr, the former BBC political editor, recently stood before an audience and said that “the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
Quite a few in the audience could claim to have been his boss. There was Mark Byford, deputy director general and head of journalism; Jana Bennett, head of television; Alan Yentob, director of drama and entertainment; Helen Boaden, head of news; Mark Damazer, head of Radio 4… and so on. Highest of all was the BBC’s head of state, Michael Grade, chairman of the board of governors, who had called this meeting. The BBC had set aside a day for a discussion of impartiality—mainly for themselves, with some others invited to share in the reflections.
It was an extraordinary day, momentous even. Extraordinary in that it did not discuss impartiality as one might have expected: as a set of practices for use in describing events through broadcast journalism. These concerns did come up, but mainly from the invited audience. Tim Gardam, former director of programmes at Channel 4, said the approach of BBC journalism must be one of rational scepticism displayed on all occasions—a remark which acted as a leitmotif of later debate. Jean Seaton, the professor of media studies at the University of Westminster, Adam Bolton, political editor of Sky News, and I all talked of how journalism must seek something which was at least a sketch of the truth.
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