Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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.
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.
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.