Impartiality and the BBC

This article appears in the new issue of the Jerusalem Report, dated 10 January 2022

Each new year brings with it a host of special anniversaries.  In 2022 few are likely to make a greater splash than the celebrations marking the centenary of the British Broadcasting Corporation.  

Today, the BBC is one of the largest and most influential broadcasting organizations in the world.  As well as serving the UK, it enjoys a massive global reach, transmitting entertainment, information, news and current events via TV, radio and the internet to audiences measured in hundreds of millions. Yet it continues to struggle with the requirement, built into its very DNA, to operate to the highest standards of objectivity, impartiality and lack of bias.  This is a problem that has haunted it for nearly half of its existence. As recently as 29 October 2021 the BBC published a new 10-point plan aimed at countering claims of bias and raising standards on impartiality across the organization.

Much of the year 1922 in Britain was taken with the business of getting broadcasting up and running in a way that avoided the chaos and commercialism that had marked its birth in the USA.  The British Broadcasting Company, as it was first known, was formed on 18 October 1922, and after several weeks of test transmissions, on 14 November Britain’s first radio station, using the call-sign 2LO, began broadcasting from Marconi House in London. 

But in the States a Pittsburgh station (later known as KDKA) had been on the air since 1920.  Others had followed, and by 1922 most US stations were being financed by the sale of advertising airtime.  This "American Plan" was rejected by all those involved in establishing  broadcasting in the UK.  Instead a so-called “British Plan” was devised to finance the new development – a licence fee to be imposed on the use of wireless sets. 

The result was that by the end of 1922 there were more than 500 radio stations broadcasting in the US, and just one – the BBC – in the UK.  And that’s the way it stayed in Britain until the introduction of commercial TV in 1955.

The new-born BBC was defined from its start by the high moral tone set by its first Director General, John Reith. 

Reith summarized the nascent BBC's purpose as to “inform, educate and entertain”. The order of priority was deliberate. To his way of thinking, entertainment was far from broadcasting’s main purpose. Informing and educating the public was of far greater importance. His principles live on to this day in the BBC’s mission statement, which runs: "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”

     From its earliest days Reith successfully established and maintained the independence of the BBC from political interference, and by 1939, when the UK went to war with Germany, the BBC’s reputation for accuracy, objectivity and impartiality was firmly established.

Throughout World War II the BBC broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe in a multiplicity of languages, and people all over the continent literally risked their lives to hear the truth from London.  In addition, the BBC’s shortwave transmissions covered the world.  At its peak it was broadcasting across the globe in some 80 languages.  The wartime reputation that the BBC acquired of honesty, objectivity, and lack of bias is the bedrock on which today’s BBC stands.  Regrettably, in the more recent past the structure has wobbled badly on its foundations.

In defining the principles which underlie its editorial guidelines, the corporation says: “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest. We are committed to achieving the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality …”

There’s an old English saying: “Fine words butter no parsnips”. In other words, it’s not what you say that counts, but what you do. And there is no doubt that, at some point during the 1960s-1970s, something began to go very wrong within the BBC.  Not a deliberate policy, perhaps, but reflecting a general shift to the left among the opinion-forming élite, the BBC’s editorial standards came to be dominated by what became known as “political correctness” – an unspoken consensus of ultra left-leaning views. 

In 2010 Mark Thompson, one-time Director General of the BBC, admitted: "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left. The organization did struggle then with impartiality."

This shift to the left permeated the BBC’s output across many types of programming including domestic political comment and even comedy.  It was no more starkly apparent than in its coverage of the Middle East in general, and Israel in particular.  The Six-Day War in 1967 marked a turning point. Until then, Israel’s kibbutz movement had been much admired in left-wing circles, and Israel itself had been seen as the brave little nation fighting off enemies intent on its destruction. With Israel conclusively victorious, a significant sector of UK public opinion shifted in favour of the Palestinians – the party now perceived as the “underdogs”, or more pertinently in terms of emerging left-wing ideology, as victims.

The philosophy that finally dominated left-wing thinking was termed “intersectionality”.  It asserted that all victims in whatever context – ethnic, sexual, economic, political – were interrelated and to be supported.  If you are opposed to one form of discrimination, the doctrine ran, you must oppose all.   Palestinians were perceived to be victims of Israeli oppression, so it became de rigueur for left-wing activists to carry the Palestinian flag and pro-Palestinian placards in mass demonstrations on a whole variety of topics, most having no connection with the Middle East.

Reflecting this, the BBC’s editorial stance began to shift significantly into the politically correct pro-Palestinian mode.  Eventually it became obvious that the corporation was no longer adhering to its much vaunted high standards of impartiality. In April 2004 the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, of antisemitism and "total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups" over a report on a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber.

 A British lawyer, Trevor Asserson, became increasingly incensed with what appeared to be the BBC’s obvious departure from its declared principles. 

Asserting that “the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by an apparent widespread antipathy toward Israel,”  Asserson commissioned a series of in-depth studies to determine if indeed the BBC’s coverage was partial and biased.  For a seven-week period in 2001, his team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a variety of other sources.  Their conclusion: the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations under its charter and broadcasting licence to be unbiased and impartial.

           In one of his reports Asserson wrote: "In private conversations with senior BBC journalists, we have been told that anti-Israel feeling is rife within the BBC. Israel is considered a hated state. Anybody who has a different view has great difficulty being heard or getting his story out… It would, however, be naïve to think that there is a stated, written BBC policy to be anti-Israel…In the BBC's anti-Israeli atmosphere, the system works informally. It is full of reporters holding left-wing, so-called 'liberal' viewpoints, including very negative ones about Israel. They then recruit people under them who have a similar outlook. In this way, the liberal left-wing system propagates itself.” 

Trevor Asserson’s reports, matched by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the corporation to commission an investigation and report from one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute detail.  This exhaustive study resulted in a 20,000-word report.  At the end of 2004 it was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the BBC, but thereafter it was treated as Top Secret and locked away.  No details of its findings were released to the media.  All the same Keith Dovkants, a journalist working for the London Evening Standard, later claimed that elements of the report had been leaked, “including Balen's conclusion that the BBC's Middle East coverage had been biased against Israel”.

 “The enormity of this can hardly be overstated,” wrote Dovkants. “Apart from the corporation's legal obligation to be impartial, it had struggled for years to counter allegations that its reporting favoured the Palestinians. The claims meshed with attacks on the BBC for being Left-leaning…Bosses at the corporation ordered Balen's report to be locked away.”

Finally, after repeated legal applications for its release under the UK Freedom of Information Act – actions defended by the corporation at a cost of over £330,000 – in 2012 the House of Lords, then the UK’s supreme court, ruled that as “a document held for journalistic purposes”, the report was explicitly excluded from the requirements of the Act.  So it has never been published, but calls to the BBC to release it continue to be made.

It was only very slowly that the Balen report began to affect BBC editorial standards for the better. In October 2004 BBC journalist, Barbara Plett, described herself in a radio report as weeping when she saw a frail Yasser Arafat being evacuated to France for medical treatment.  Complaints of bias against Plett were at first rejected by the BBC, but a year later the relevant BBC committee ruled that Plett’s comments “breached the requirements of due impartiality”, and the then BBC director of news apologized for what she described as "an editorial misjudgment".

During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009, when the media took to charging Israel with “disproportionate” military activity, and later of war crimes, Israel’s case largely went by default as far as the BBC was concerned. In April 2009 a series of complaints of inaccuracy and anti-Israel bias were brought against the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. On investigation the charges of bias were not sustained, but three complaints of inaccuracy were fully or partially upheld by the BBC.

In 2012, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, the BBC seemed to present a more balanced view of the conflict. Their reports included something of Israel’s perspective, although the general impression left on the TV and radio audience was of a triumphant Hamas upholding the “armed struggle” against Israel and, as a principal partner in negotiating Egypt’s peace plan, winning valuable concessions in the cease-fire.

During Operation Protective Edge in 2014 the BBC clearly tried to ensure that an Israeli point of view was included in reports of the conflict. Its newscasters adopted a sharper edge in their questioning of Palestinian spokespeople. Moreover, they located an experienced journalist within Israel to balance the overall narrative.

The current effort by the BBC to renew its commitment to the principles of impartiality embedded in its constitution stems from the appointment in June 2020 of a new BBC Director General.  Tim Davie came to the post publicly committed to restoring public trust in the BBC.
 His new “action plan on impartiality and editorial standards”, published on 29 October,  amounts to a series of guidelines to staff on how to achieve his objective.  “Impartiality,” he told BBC staff, “is sacrosanct.”  On joining the corporation, he said, staff were required to leave their personal political views “at the door.”  He was prepared to dismiss anyone who breached the guidelines.  The BBC had to be “free from political bias”.

To underline how seriously the BBC takes the matter, the new plan commits the corporation to regular checks on the impartiality of its output, to be carried out by external experts.  Davie seems to have rediscovered the moral compass that guided the BBC in its early years, and was then apparently mislaid.  Could there possibly be a more appropriate 100th birthday present? 

All the same, another apt English saying does spring to mind: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”