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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS
THE NEWS FROM HERE
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Tim Gardam
Producer: Michael Blastland
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS
020 8752 6252

Broadcast Date:
Repeat Date:
Tape Number:
Duration:

25.03.04
28.03.04

Taking part in order of appearance:


Andrew Graham
Master of Balliol College, Oxford University
Dominic Lawson
Editor of The Sunday Telegraph
Stuart Purvis
Former Chief Executive of ITN
Patricia Hodgson
Former Chief Executive of ITC
Mark Fowler
Former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission
Troy Jollimore
Professor of Philosophy, University of California
Richard Sambrook
Director of News, BBC

GARDAM: You are normally a listener to Radio


4. Youre so used to the interrogative tones of BBC interviewers, that
probably it never occurs to you the sorts of things you never hear them say.
So just imagine, after Lord Huttons Report on the Kelly Affair, youd
scanned other broadcasters looking for a different perspective, and youd
come across this:
The British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to pay for its blatant anti
Americanism before and during the Iraq War. A frothing at the mouth antiAmericanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest. So the next time
you hear the BBC bragging about how much superior the Brits are
delivering the news rather than Americans who wear flags in their lapels,
remember it was the BBC caught lying.
I found that on the website of Fox News. Fox News is now the leading 24
hour news channel in the United States. Owned by Rupert Murdoch it
revels in its patriotic duty and can now be found on digital satellite
television in this country. It broadcasts under the slogan Fair and
Balanced.
Now, if youd read that commentary in a British newspaper, you probably
wouldnt have thought much of it. But in Britain, broadcasting has always
been different. Unlike newspapers, its been obliged to be duly impartial.
And there have grown up standard tests of what that involves: a
commitment to accuracy, a balance of views, the right to reply and the
separation of news from comment. Andrew Graham is an economist and
Master of Balliol College at Oxford University.
GRAHAM: What you want is to get at least some
of your news from sources where you trust that what the people are trying
to do is not spin you a line. We let kids go to school and be monopolized
at the most vulnerable part of their lives, but we do it because we think that
schools are educators, not indoctrinators to reveal the world to you, not to
tell you how you ought to see the world. So its absolutely critical that at
least some of our news comes from people who have those kinds of
purposes.
GARDAM: Yet, in all the other ways we find out
whats going on in the world, we dont need to be protected from being
spun a line. It is as if we dont trust ourselves to sift the truth from the
airwaves in the way we have always been prepared to do in newspapers
and in print. For Dominic Lawson, Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, the
impartial journalists position has always been fraught with problems.
LAWSON: Everybody has views, everybody has
opinions. Broadcast journalists being journalists will probably be

opinionated people with strong opinions. And I think it is sometimes, I


suspect, very difficult for them to detach their own views, which by
definition they will see as reasonable, from as it were what is in fact
notionally an unprejudiced view. I mean I think its a chimera by the way,
to a degree, because I think if you actually try to define what is meant by
unbiased, its very, very hard to do.
GARDAM: Hard maybe, but always accepted as a
precondition for broadcasters. The original requirement dates back to the
very beginning when broadcasting was a monopoly, because
technologically it couldnt be otherwise. Then the potential to spin a line
was very great. Totalitarian governments, Fascist and Communist, did so,
after all. So impartiality was seen as a guarantee of freedom. It was a selfdenying ordinance by those entrusted with the power to use this dangerous
medium to purge themselves of any personal agenda.
For over twenty-five years, Stuart Purvis played by these rules. He was,
until last year, Chief Executive of ITN and took his personal impartiality
with all the seriousness of a medieval monks vow of chastity.
PURVIS: I took the issue of impartiality so
seriously that I took it to an obsession. I didnt vote for twenty years in any
kind of election whatsoever because I didnt want to go through the small
intellectual hoop of actually choosing between one or the other.
GARDAM: In 1982, Channel 4 was born with a
remit to develop alternative voices. It was in its way the precursor to the
fragmented world of multi channel broadcasting we see today. Within its
remit was a new news programme. After a dodgy start, Stuart Purvis
became Editor of Channel 4 News and gave it a clear identity. It was, he
now admits, liberal news that dared not speak its name. Because after all it
was impartial, wasnt it?
PURVIS: I believe that there was a gap in the
market for a liberal agenda. I would say there is a difference between the
agenda of a programme and the execution of a programme in terms of
being impartial. Now this has become a sort of battle cry for me; that
actually what we need are more and different agenda. Theres too much
sameness about the agenda. We have to be honest and say that there is no
such thing as an impartial agenda. There are just different interests, some
different interest groups, and thats a starting point for me on the debate
about impartiality.
GARDAM: But wasnt one of the effects of
Channel 4 News when you started it to show up, if you like, News at Ten
and Alistair Burnett as Conservative news?
PURVIS: Well the clearest example was the
miners strike, and its twenty years ago but its still quite fresh in my
mind. I mean I believed that the coverage on BBC1 and ITV of the
miners strike was basically seeing everything from the police picket line
point of view, and thats partly because that was sometimes the safest place
to be to put your cameras. If, on the other hand, you went and put your
cameras the other side of the picket line, behind the pickets, you got a
completely different perspective on what was going on. In the battle of
Orgreave you had ITV cameras from ITN behind the police lines and you
had Channel 4 News cameras from ITN behind the picket lines and at the
end of the day we would actually exchange pictures. But the fact that it
was perceived that we were taking sides, if you like, like that, was a
chilling moment for everybody, and certainly on the air it did look as if the
ITV News from ITN was following a police agenda and that the Channel 4
News was following a strikers agenda. It wasnt quite like that, but thats

the reality of how it was perceived.


GARDAM: Whats very interesting about what
youre saying is that if you like Channel 4 News, a prototype new entrant
into a market, changed the notion of impartiality from a consensus view
and forced people to see it in more variegated terms.
PURVIS: And whats encouraging, it got very
few complaints as a result because the execution of the journalism was
impartial in the sense that it met the issues of accuracy, it met the issues of
separation of news and comment which we were very particular about, it
met the issue of fairness so everyone had their say. So as long as you met
those other points, my belief is that it doesnt matter what your agenda is as
long as the delivery of the news is impartial.
GARDAM: Channel 4s remit has always been to
push boundaries. On Stuart Purviss admission impartiality has been no
exception. Though we may think of impartiality as some dependable gold
standard, I suspect that over the lifetime of television and radio what we
consider impartial has changed quite significantly. Listen to the political
interviews of the 1950s and they seem now obsequious and a bit
embarrassing. Such flexibility is written into the regulators Codes of
Practice. They define the broadcasters responsibility as ensuring due
impartiality. That due is a small, but significant word. Patricia Hodgson
is the former Chief Executive of the Independent Television Commission,
which gave way this year to the new media regulator Ofcom.
HODGSON:
Impartiality, like truth, is relative. Its
in my mind, its in the mind of the beholder. And since it is not an
absolute, we must be sophisticated enough to allow, and indeed to
encourage, these different approaches to impartiality rooted in different
world views.
GARDAM: The text of the regulations talks about
due impartiality. Is that a useful term?
HODGSON:
Its an extremely wise term because it
allows the kind of flexibility and understanding of the relative natures of
truth that weve been discussing and prevents you having to narrow news
coverage to a series of indisputable facts which, after all, on their own are
not likely to illuminate our understanding of a difficult issue.
GARDAM: For, Patricia Hodgson, judgement on
impartiality must be made over time and in context, holistically as she
puts it. But at some point the regulator has to judge if a broadcaster has
crossed the line. In 1999, the ITC withdrew the license of a Kurdish
television station as it ruled it was broadcasting propaganda and inciting
terrorism. In a global media, the channels available here increase all the
time. Aljazeera, the Arab 24 hour news channel is available in Britain. So
is the American Fox News. Their respective world views are implacably at
odds. Last year, after the Iraq War, The ITC examined both but judged
neither had breached its Codes. How could both these channels be deemed
impartial?
HODGSON:
They clearly came from different
starting points. They had sufficient of the disciplines of news for accuracy
and a holistic view that, if you took into account the cultures from which
they came, I think met our requirements. And the alternative was that you
said these news services do not meet the British view of due impartiality
and so we are going to censor and ban them from the UK, which clearly
would have been a ridiculous outcome and an attack on freedom of speech.
That did not mean, however, that we did, or the regulator currently should,

license propaganda or news services that dont have that degree of allowing
alternative views to be expressed, complying with fundamental
requirements of accuracy.
GARDAM: At this point one might well ask:
when does a regulator, with such a flexible interpretation of impartiality,
end up standing on its head? Wouldnt it be more honest these days to
admit that impartiality cannot be a universal requirement? This, after all, is
the case in America.
America used to have a Fairness Doctrine codified in law. But, in 1987,
under President Reagan, Mark Fowler took over at the Federal
Communications Commission. He simply abolished the Fairness Doctrine.
FOWLER: The fairness doctrine was misguided
from the beginning. It took the first amendment which says that the
Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press
and turned it on its head.
GARDAM: So do you think the way youre
arguing that the regulator and the government were essentially the same
thing?
FOWLER: Oh theres no question. Any time a
branch of government steps in to determine whether a particular broadcast
was fair and then says it wasnt fair, youve got to put on these other
viewpoints, youve got the government acting in effect as a censor.
GARDAM: So, in your view, the public interest is
essentially the market interest?
FOWLER: The publics interest, I have said,
defines the public interest, and by that I mean lets let the marketplace of
ideas function freely. Now really the basic conflict, Tim, comes down to a
fair marketplace of ideas versus a free marketplace of ideas and to try to
make a marketplace of ideas fair people have turned to the government to
do that; and the problem with that is at that point you no longer have a truly
free marketplace of ideas because you have the government stepping in and
donning censors robes and a grease pencil and acting as a censor. So the
basic conflict fair versus free I would choose to resolve in terms of free,
which means that it may not always be fair but it is free, and in a
democracy I think thats vital.
GARDAM: Is impartiality as a value something
you feel comfortable with, and do you think its something thats
realizable?
FOWLER: Impartiality?
GARDAM: Yes.
FOWLER:
It really depends on how you define
that. If youre looking at the whole marketplace of ideas, which today is
cable, its direct satellite to the home, its the internet, its over-the-air
broadcasting, its books, newspapers, movies, hand bills, public meetings,
it goes on and on and on, I would argue that let every speaker speak as they
wish whether theyre partial or impartial and, out of that welter of different
conflicting and the same ideas, the common man can decide what is good
and true. So in todays marketplace, particularly, I dont think you need to
insist that each speaker be impartial. In fact thats not the way the free
marketplace of ideas works and never has.

GARDAM: So the argument comes down to one


about market forces in a democracy. Can we trust the market to deliver
what we need as both citizens and consumers? Mark Fowlers most
famous remark was to call television toasters with pictures. In his free
market Pantheon, information markets are no different to other markets.
Markets will provide choice. In a democracy we are free to choose. In a
free market of ideas, it is especially wrong to allow government to
determine what we can or cannot choose to hear. This is the crux. Even if
impartiality was necessary before there was a true broadcast market, why
do we need such a requirement now that we have one? Because, says
Andrew Graham, information is not just another commodity market.
GRAHAM: Selling information is a particularly
problematic thing. If people are to buy something and to know how much
to pay for it, they have to be well informed about it. Ideally they ought to
know everything about it. So we have this paradox that if they know
everything about it, they dont need to buy it. But then theres a second
problem, which is you have to ask what is it that the person whos making
the news programme is trying to do? And in the marketplace, theyre
trying to get subscribers or theyre trying to get ratings. Thats whats
driving them and that doesnt necessarily give you accurate, well-balanced
news.
GARDAM: So, if markets on their own are going
to deliver all the information we need as consumers, in the form we need it
to make decisions as citizens, they also have to prove we can trust them. As
it is, opinion polls in Britain show that broadcast news is trusted far more
than newspapers because it is believed to be impartial. In a world that is
increasingly fragmented, we have to think more carefully about how we
know what we know. Even if all the necessary information is out there
somewhere, how do we know we are getting it? Troy Jollimore is Professor
of Philosophy at the state University of California. He believes that the
obligation on each broadcaster individually to be impartial corrects a
market failure in information.
JOLLIMORE:
People of course tend to find the one
channel that they trust and that reflects their own views, that sort of parrots
back to them what they already think, and they just watch that; and so even
if the other opinions are being represented out there on other channels, it
doesnt mean that people are going to get them. And theres a really huge
difference between seeing a number of people out there, each of them
giving a different view from a different perspective, which comes to seem
sort of relativist in some way, and seeing a number of people say sit down
at a table in one place so that there a dialogue rather than a number of
monologues. What weve ended up with, at least in this country, largely as
a result I think of getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, is a situation where
we have a very large number of monologues.
GARDAM: But thats the way we have consumed
the printed word over centuries. If the television market develops the
diversity of print, why shouldnt it be free to operate the same way? Fox
News competes in a market for trust with CNN and other News providers.
So why does Andrew Graham so dislike it?
GRAHAM: Theres been a study done by the
University of Maryland plotting American attitudes to the war in Iraq, and
they found that sixty percent of Americans suffered from one of three
major misconceptions: either that Iraq and Al Quaeda were closely linked
or that weapons of mass destruction had been found or the publics opinion
supported the USA in the war. Its pretty surprising that sixty percent of
Americans would suffer from one of those three misperceptions, but what
is really dramatic is that when we look at the source of peoples news,

eighty percent of people who watch Fox believe this; whereas if they relied
on national public radio, the figure drops to twenty-three percent.
GARDAM: What the Maryland Research cannot
tell us of course is whether those Fox viewers would change their beliefs if
they switched to an impartial broadcaster. Maybe they just choose Fox
because it reflects their views. Just as they do newspapers. Dominic
Lawson, Editor of The Sunday Telegraph does not accept that the fact his
paper is openly Conservative undermines the credibility of its reporting.
LAWSON: Whats important, I think, is accuracy
and reliability, and its possible as it were to have a certain lack of
impartiality but still to be accurate and reliable and I dont think really one
can have bitter complaint against that. We talk about impartiality. I think
it may be more sensible to talk about accuracy because thats an easier
thing to define and easier to invigilate. And I think thats the key. I
suspect that the idea of bias may be secondary.
GARDAM: But that assumes that a newspaper can
indeed separate its views from its reporting of fact. However, for the most
senior journalist at the BBC, Richard Sambrook, the impartial view sets
higher standards than mere accuracy. For the BBC, which because of its
universal licence fee must always be impartial, the moment partial
comment is connected to news, the snake has entered the garden.
SAMBROOK:
Even though in the news pages of a
newspaper they adopt a kind of fair and accurate approach, nevertheless a
lot of the judgments that lie behind their selection of items, their ordering
of items, so on, will be driven by the agenda of that particular newspaper.
So this isnt just simply about saying are the facts right and lets separate
that from the comment pages. The judgments and the attitudes that lie
behind a newspaper and lie behind its political position influence a great
many things throughout the newspaper, and I think that would be true in
broadcasting as well.
LAWSON: One hopes that actually market forces
would make news programmes realize how vital it is not to be seen as
inaccurate or tendentious because when that happens I suspect people will
turn to a channel which they would feel was accurate because if you cant
quite believe it, why are you watching it? Im being quite cynical about it.
If it was a commercial news network and they were selling advertisements
in the middle of a long bulletin, they would find that if the news bulletins
were not trusted generally, were thought to be unreliable, fewer people
would watch it and the rate that they could charge for advertisers would
fall. So I think there are actually quite good free market reasons why a
broadcaster ought to want, should want, would want to be trustworthy.
GARDAM: Dominic Lawson, whos persuasive
that the market will expose anyone who has no regard for accuracy. Thats
one to the free marketeers. But when we go shopping in the market, is
accuracy the only dependable currency we need? Troy Jollimore.
JOLLIMORE:
A person might say if we make sure
that every statement in our news stories is accurate and is true to the best of
our ability, then weve done as much as can be done and there is no more
to be desired in terms of impartiality. But I dont in fact think thats quite
true because its not just a matter, for instance, of making sure that every
individual statement is accurate. One can construct a very misleading
account full of entirely true statements just by leaving certain things out
and emphasizing other things.
GARDAM: Okay, so accuracy on itself is not

enough.

What is the extra ingredient that makes something impartial?

JOLLIMORE:
I want to say something you know I
think accurate but vague - fair-mindedness, something like that: truly
giving each idea a chance to be heard. Now that sounds like balance, but I
think perhaps its something a bit different.
Im thinking about the idea of
a free marketplace of ideas as people like John Stewart Mill used to write
about. People hear that phrase now and they think the free market of ideas
means that you let the market - that is the money, the cash market determine which ideas get heard and so the most successful news stations
are the ones that broadcast their ideas to the most people and so forth. And
thats not really what Mill meant at all. What he meant was that every idea
would get heard and that we would, to the extent that its humanly possible
again, try out every idea, even the ones that strike us immediately as
somewhat implausible, maybe even the ones that strike us immediately as
offensive; that we must examine the evidence and the arguments given to
us by the people who disagree with us.
GARDAM: There are two very different
assumptions bound up in this market of ideas. On the one hand, Dominic
Lawson and Mark Fowler believe the free flow of information will be
regulated by the consumers desire for both accuracy and diversity.
Markets can deliver reliability without regulators ruling what you can or
cannot say. But Andrew Graham believes that its not a matter of
prohibiting markets, but of protecting those values that markets not only
dont recognize, but in fact force out altogether.
GRAHAM: You might be able to have a free
market of ideas if you could meet the following two conditions: one would
be that there would be a great many people speaking with equal power
we dont at the moment even remotely approach that condition; secondly,
that the people speaking would be able to speak on the power and
conviction of their ideas rather than the power of their pocket. And the
marketplace rewards the power of the pocket, so one of the reasons why
you want public service broadcasting is that this can be a place in which
ideas can come which dont have to have been promoted by people with
the money to pay for them.
GARDAM: What drives both sides of this
argument is this: whether impartiality is a better place from which to look
at the world, or is it just one perspective of no greater value than a partial
one. Andrew Graham believes the former. Mark Fowler the latter.
GRAHAM: I think impartiality is a core value and
it does have a somewhat higher moral standing, but having a free debate in
which any serious idea is given serious weight in the discussion is, I think,
an absolutely core requirement of a democratic society.
FOWLER: I think impartiality is good and it may
not be good. If somebody wants to be partial and express only one point of
view on the political spectrum, I dont say that thats bad. If somebody
wants to try to be balanced and, as you say, objective you know as you
define it, thats fine too. Let a thousand flowers bloom and let people
decide what they will.
GARDAM: But one is not better than the other?
FOWLER:
No, absolutely not. You know some
of the greatest ideas have come from people who are very partial.
GARDAM: This debate, where both sides have an
absolute regard for freedom of speech, comes down to an age-old issue: are
certain values absolute or are they inevitably shaped by what technology

allows us to do. When only a few voices were possible, then a requirement
to impartiality was not preventing views being aired, it was making room
for them. But in a world where technology will increasingly allow for
diversity, does the regulator inevitably become the censor. Patricia
Hodgson.
HODGSON:
You need to combine impartiality
with pluralism. My impartiality depends on my doing my best to respect
all the points of view that I think are relevant, but my prejudices will mean
that there are some points of view which are relevant that I dont recognize.
And you similarly may come from a sufficiently different starting point
that while you are trying your utmost to be honourable there are things that
you regard as complete madness, and yet probably if you and I were
debating the treatment of a particular story we could find enough common
ground to recognize whether that story had been treated properly. So due
impartiality allows us to have my impartiality, your impartiality and a
sensible debate about the boundaries beyond which you are actually
straying into prejudice, misinformation and propaganda.
GARDAM: This seems to me a convincing
argument, so far as it goes. It recognises that there is a clear boundary that
sets the impartial view apart. But can we really continue to prohibit
broadcasters who deliberately stray beyond it? What would be wrong with
having a Daily Telegraph of the air and The Guardian too? Why shouldnt
their partial views appear in counterpoint to impartial ones? Its true, wed
get tabloid tv and radio shock jocks too, but should we be frightened of
that? Maybe impartiality has to become not an obligation but a choice, and
the role of the regulator will be to authenticate, awarding a sort of kite
mark to those who want to sign up to it. After all, impartiality may well be
a brand that many will seek to claim as their own. Ofcom, the new
communications regulator, could be the arbiter. In that case, says Richard
Sambrook of the BBC, the impartial view will need to carry a far heavier
burden of proof.
SAMBROOK:
In the end I suspect where we are is
that were going to have to redefine impartiality and were going to have to
start measuring it and defining it and coming up with you know matrices in
some way that actually really define this debate to a greater extent than
weve ever had to before.
GARDAM: Are you saying that impartiality then
is going to have to be measured?
SAMBROOK:
Oh I think were heading in that
direction, yes, and thats going to be extremely difficult because by and
large its subjective. But in terms of surveying and qualitative measures, I
think quite soon people are going to start to say how do we measure
impartiality and is this you know a pints worth or a gallons worth.
GARDAM: Whether or not one brandishes a tape
measure, personally, I would always want to know that the BBC was there,
wedded to a value against which I could judge anyone else. But I am
curious too to know what its Telegraph or Guardian counterpart would
sound like, with its editorials and opinion columns in full view. I cant see
why we should not be allowed to judge. The range of choice that
technology now makes possible must fundamentally change things.
Impartiality was broadcastings cornerstone when the dimensions of radio
and television were simple and clear. Now they are fluid and can only
become more confused. This does not mean that impartiality has lost any of
its value, but it does mean that we will have to choose if we value it.

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