Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. 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: 25.03.04 Repeat Date: 28.03.04 Tape Number: Duration: 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. You’re 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 Hutton’s Report on the Kelly Affair, you’d scanned other broadcasters looking for a different perspective, and you’d 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 anti- Americanism 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 you’d read that commentary in a British newspaper, you probably wouldn’t have thought much of it. But in Britain, broadcasting has always been different. Unlike newspapers, it’s 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 it’s 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 what’s going on in the world, we don’t need to be protected from being spun a line. It is as if we don’t 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 journalist’s 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 it’s a chimera by the way, to a degree, because I think if you actually try to define what is meant by unbiased, it’s 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 couldn’t 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 self- denying 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 monk’s vow of chastity. PURVIS: I took the issue of impartiality so seriously that I took it to an obsession. I didn’t vote for twenty years in any kind of election whatsoever because I didn’t 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, wasn’t 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. There’s 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 that’s a starting point for me on the debate about impartiality. GARDAM: But wasn’t 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 it’s twenty years ago but it’s 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 that’s 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 striker’s agenda. It wasn’t quite like that, but that’s the reality of how it was perceived. GARDAM: What’s very interesting about what you’re 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 what’s 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 doesn’t matter what your agenda is as long as the delivery of the news is impartial. GARDAM: Channel 4’s remit has always been to push boundaries. On Stuart Purvis’s 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. It’s in my mind, it’s 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: It’s an extremely wise term because it allows the kind of flexibility and understanding of the relative natures of truth that we’ve 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 don’t 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? Wouldn’t 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 you’re arguing that the regulator and the government were essentially the same thing? FOWLER: Oh there’s no question. Any time a branch of government steps in to determine whether a particular broadcast was fair and then says it wasn’t fair, you’ve got to put on these other viewpoints, you’ve got the government acting in effect as a censor. GARDAM: So, in your view, the public interest is essentially the market interest? FOWLER: The public’s interest, I have said, defines the public interest, and by that I mean let’s 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 censor’s 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 that’s vital. GARDAM: Is impartiality as a value something you feel comfortable with, and do you think it’s something that’s realizable? FOWLER: Impartiality? GARDAM: Yes. FOWLER: It really depends on how you define that. If you’re looking at the whole marketplace of ideas, which today is cable, it’s direct satellite to the home, it’s the internet, it’s over-the-air broadcasting, it’s 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 they’re 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 today’s marketplace, particularly, I don’t think you need to insist that each speaker be impartial. In fact that’s 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 Fowler’s 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 don’t need to buy it. But then there’s a second problem, which is you have to ask what is it that the person who’s making the news programme is trying to do? And in the marketplace, they’re trying to get subscribers or they’re trying to get ratings. That’s what’s driving them and that doesn’t 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 doesn’t mean that people are going to get them. And there’s 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 we’ve 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 that’s the way we have consumed the printed word over centuries. If the television market develops the diversity of print, why shouldn’t 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: There’s 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 public’s opinion supported the USA in the war. It’s 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 people’s 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: What’s important, I think, is accuracy and reliability, and it’s possible as it were to have a certain lack of impartiality but still to be accurate and reliable and I don’t 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 that’s an easier thing to define and easier to invigilate. And I think that’s 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 isn’t just simply about saying are the facts right and let’s 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 can’t quite believe it, why are you watching it? I’m 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, who’s persuasive that the market will expose anyone who has no regard for accuracy. That’s 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 we’ve done as much as can be done and there is no more to be desired in terms of impartiality. But I don’t in fact think that’s quite true because it’s 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 it’s something a bit different. I’m 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 that’s 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 it’s 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 consumer’s desire for both accuracy and diversity. Markets can deliver reliability without regulators ruling what you can or cannot say. But Andrew Graham believes that it’s not a matter of prohibiting markets, but of protecting those values that markets not only don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t say that that’s bad. If somebody wants to try to be balanced and, as you say, objective you know as you define it, that’s 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 don’t 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 shouldn’t their partial views appear in counterpoint to impartial ones? It’s true, we’d 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 we’re going to have to redefine impartiality and we’re 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 we’ve ever had to before. GARDAM: Are you saying that impartiality then is going to have to be measured? SAMBROOK: Oh I think we’re heading in that direction, yes, and that’s going to be extremely difficult because by and large it’s 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 pint’s worth or a gallon’s 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 can’t see why we should not be allowed to judge. The range of choice that technology now makes possible must fundamentally change things. Impartiality was broadcasting’s 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. 6