What is impartiality?

A brief explanation to clear up some misunderstandings

All broadcasters in the UK are committed to the principle of impartiality in their news and current affairs programming, either via their own guidelines or the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.

There’s some confusion that this simply means a balance between the views of the different political parties, but this isn’t the case. Sometimes all the parties may agree on a contentious issue, but balancing voices outside the party political landscape are still required.

An example is climate change. Impartiality means curating a range of views around the known facts. Not all views are considered to be of equal weight requiring inclusion - for example, the BBC has decided that its climate change coverage doesn’t have to include voices which deny climate change is the result of human activity, or is taking place at all.

What it does have to include is a range of voices on the best ways to address the issue of climate change. A judgment is made on what’s called due impartiality. Due simply means appropriate to the content and the subject.

Who makes the judgment? Usually a mid-level editor will have oversight, but every single journalist from top to bottom in each media organisation should be able to make sensible decisions on due impartiality, and they usually can.

In the case of the BBC - it’s conducted special reviews of coverage of climate change, migration and taxation, so there’s an additional resource and layer of guidance for its journalists.

That’s the range of views covered - not too complicated - but you can’t curate a range of views around the facts until you’ve established what the facts are.

The power of facts is in their neutrality. You don’t have to balance a fact with a non-fact, or an anti-fact. You might go on to say ‘Some people believe (insert non-fact belief here..)’ but you don’t have to present those beliefs as if they were facts: ‘The earth is an oblate spheroid. Also the earth is flat’. We don’t do that.

This is where it goes wrong on sex and gender. Most people have heard the saying: ‘When two people are arguing about whether or not it’s raining, it’s not the journalist’s job to simply report the argument. You have to go to the window and look out to see if it’s raining or not’.

On sex and gender, this means going to the window, establishing what’s true (that sex is binary, immutable and based on reproductive role) and assembling opinions around that. These could include - that gender identity is real, that gender identity determines your sex, that society should pretend gender identity determines your sex, that society should legislate/repeal legislation in this area, that no one should ever be required to accommodate the opposite sex in their spaces, plus others - there is a whole spectrum of opinion.

This doesn’t happen anywhere except in portions of GB News coverage. So what has happened instead at Sky, the BBC, ITN and Channel 4?

Two different things. The BBC has gone some way toward establishing the facts around sex and gender in guidance issued last December.

‘Gender identity is based on the feelings, behaviour, expectations and outward presentation typically considered to correspond to someone's sex. For example, a person whose sex is female might identify as male, or vice versa.’

However this guidance was couched in activist language, and the same document told BBC journalists to ignore the facts which it just outlined, and adopt self-identification of sex for trans-identified people. That is, it told its entire staff professionally to adopt a very specific, extreme, activist, controversial and unsubstantiated belief as if it were true.

ITV, Channel 4 and Sky simply skipped the part where they were supposed to establish the facts, and landed squarely in the same place as the BBC - with self-identification.

There were three options for broadcasters.

1. Establish the facts around the reality of sex and curate views and beliefs around those facts

2. Treat the reality of sex and the belief in gender identity as if they were of equal weight

3. Treat the belief in gender identity as if it were of greater weight than the reality of sex

As we now know, they all went for Option Three. The reality of sex isn’t given the slightest weight. Inaccuracy was chosen over accuracy, and bias was chosen over impartiality.

This is what makes their coverage fail both the accuracy test and the impartiality test.

You can have accuracy without impartiality but you cannot have impartiality without accuracy.

Accuracy comes first. Without accuracy, you cannot begin to be impartial. Many people would settle for accuracy: if sex were accurately described every single time, the proliferation of anti-reality opinions would be far less important and carry much less weight.

But that’s not the path chosen by our major broadcasters. This isn’t a party political issue. It’s no good broadcasting a view on the GRA from Labour and a view on the GRA from the Tories if they’re the same view. Far better to have two people on the same political side but who can have a debate about where their differences are. You want diversity of opinions.

Hopefully this will help people make representations to their local authorities, their schools, their place of work, charities, and so on, when they have internal policies on impartiality, and need to be able to parse the ways in which those policies are failing.

Always start with the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Your employer or service provider isn’t being impartial unless it starts from an understanding of the truth.