Neutrality in News Outlets
Inspired by discussion on another thread I wondered about neutrality in the News.
What does neutral mean? Does it divert things from reality? How does a news media’s general stance influence what is neutral.
To get us going some ex BBC news staff have said that finding an opposing view on a subject from experts was sometimes very difficult. The BBC shows its neutrality by giving both sides of the argument. It had sometimes taken hours to find an opposing voice because most experts agree. This may be neutral in the eyes of the BBC but it isn’t reality.
What does neutral mean? Does it divert things from reality? How does a news media’s general stance influence what is neutral.
To get us going some ex BBC news staff have said that finding an opposing view on a subject from experts was sometimes very difficult. The BBC shows its neutrality by giving both sides of the argument. It had sometimes taken hours to find an opposing voice because most experts agree. This may be neutral in the eyes of the BBC but it isn’t reality.
Comments
On a GB News bulletin you don't get any discussions. It's akin to the football results being read out.
The point is that the news items don't just fall off trees. Someone will have selected and edited them. The football results aren't 'selected'. The announcer reads all the results in each league in turn. News sound-bites or bulletins aren't in any way analogous to that at all.
You are not comparing like with like.
I'd have to agree. Even if they only report on verifiable facts with no editorial, comment or opinion, the choice of which facts to report is inherently political.
This.
For example, the BBC regularly reports Premier League scores but is suspiciously silent about my local non-league side. Not to mention the leading French, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch leagues...
Unfortunately, it's still the best there is.
What I'm trying to get across to him, though, at the risk of repetition and indeed of sounding patronising - which is not how I want to sound at all - is that the presentation of facts is by no means neutral.
I could relay a fact that I went to Northampton on Tuesday night (I didn't but I'm using it for the purpose of illustration). What I might not tell you is that I mugged an old lady while I was there or committed a burglary.
The news or 'facts' that GB News (or any other news outlet) chooses to present is exactly that, a choice. GB News is bound to report, for instance, that a Labour government's proposed measures to tax Non Doms is going to harm the UK economy. Of course they are going to report that. The Guardian or New Statesman or The Daily Mirror might report that differently.
No news bulletin is simply a bald presentation of 'facts'.
That's not how these things work.
In it's short hourly bulletins GB News tends to restrict itself to the major news stories of the day. From what I have read in this thread, it would appear to be no more biased than all other news channels.
As for the programmes themselves, they include a right wing perspective, a left wing perspective and a neutral perspective.
There's no such thing as a 'neutral' perspective. You can have a left wing, a right wing or a centrist perspective, say, but none of them are 'neutral'. They all represent a particular stand-point.
I will accept centrist instead of neutral then
Actual left or just "not tory/reform"?
But then, Tribune isn't going to give Liz Truss a regular column either ...
But most media outlets will provide a contrasting viewpoint to their usual one at times in order to add colour and variety or to show its readers/viewers what it believes they are up against.
This was highlighted by Malcolm Muggeridge in his "Christ and the media" lectures back in the 70s.
Hard left normally
It all depends on the context. That applies to any media outlet of course and not just GB News.
Though it’s a question of degree - nationally the BBC won’t but BBC Midlands Today will report on Solihull Moors at level five and Kidderminster Harriers at level 6. So actually the BBC probably cover non-league more than anyone else does!
Such awful language ill befits this esteemed board.
(I’m a lifelong Bromsgrove Rovers/Sporting fan)
Have you considered counselling? Recky Carter’s Green White Army indeed.
I saw this as a profound and worrying change. I think it has had an extremely negative effect on journalism and encouraged increasing partisan bias in all parts of the media. It is fair enough to recognise one's own bias but that should not make one despair of the existence of truth. I prefer Feynman's dictum about science: that one is supposed to bend over backwards to see if one might be wrong.
I'm not sure that this philosophical shift as you put it marks a gradual departure from objective journalistic standards so much as a recognition that neutrality is an unrealistic aspiration.
By and large, whatever the political flavour the editors or proprietors favour, I think that local and increasingly endangered print journalism adheres to higher standards than most online sources.
I think standards have dropped over the last few decades but I think there are other reasons for that.
OK, I took one for the team and watched one of their bulletins.
Yes, they were were reporting the same items as the BBC and in the same order, but I found the inflections in the presenters voice seemed very much to be trying to influence the way the viewers are supposed to think. For instance, that Trump’s supporters have expressed OUTRAGE that British LABOUR PARTY ACTIVISTS have been supporting Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Same words, different inflection.
We could start a humorous thread in Heaven about genius headlines or deliberately or unintentionally funny ones.
But yes, very often the headline is at variance with the tone or intention of the story itself.
The press standards require differentiation between news and comment. News is required to be factual and fair.
Officially, headlines are not part of the article and are comment, not news. It is this rule that gives our print media a free pass.
Realistic or not, neutrality is a legal requirement of broadcast channels. Which is why GBNews is so often in trouble with OfCom.
Although OfCom has thus far been totally and utterly toothless.
@TurquoiseTastic, I totally agree with Feynman, both in science and journalism.
@Spike, Thank you for your service.
AFZ
Do we really want "neutrality" in news accounts? Take, for example, recent coverage of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Most news outlets have been willing, sometimes even eager, to express sympathy for those who have died or lost their homes to those disasters. Most of us would find it offputting if the news handled this in a neutral manner, refusing to comment on whether these disasters were a good thing or a bad thing.
It's only when questions of money or power are involved that news outlets seem to be expected to suspend their moral judgment.
Being a victim of a natural disaster is obviously a bad thing for those victims - everyone agrees with that, and there's no possible "alternative viewpoint". Start relating the increasing frequency of such disasters to global climate change, and you'll see the usual suspects start to squeal.
Or consider the October 7th terror attack in Israel. I think everyone would agree that being murdered in your bed, being raped and kidnapped, being tortured are bad things. Yet plenty of people around the world consider the Oct 7th attacks justifiable in the wider context of Israel's actions in Palestine, and so consider the attacks to have been good things.
Plenty of other people think the Oct 7th attacks were the worst kind of evil, but cheer on the actions of Israel in Gaza.
Yes, the same applies to radio stations of course, they play material their listeners want to hear.
Or broadcasters like the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, CNN, Fox News and that other one that retired copper from the Midlands watches.
You know...
What's it called?
The one that keeps getting into trouble with Ofcom for its lack of objectivity ...
@alienfromzog - I don't think 'neutrality' is a requirement for journalism as it's generally known and accepted that any media outlet is going to have a particular slant or stance. That is unavoidable.
No, what is required of journalists are certain agreed codes of practice in news-reporting which requires them not to make things up, not to tell porkies and to aim for balance and objectivity.
There's a lot of dichotomising, as it were, going on here - as if there are only binary choices out there - and without trying to act like a junior Host I think @Leorning Cniht may be in danger of that, as well as straying into Epiphanies territory, with his citation of the current Israel/Gaza conflict.
Coming back to GB News, because it has regularly breached OfCom standards doesn't mean that everything it reports is false or factually incorrect, but it does mean that it fails to maintain accepted industry standards.
Which is something its biggest fan here has to take into account and process in some way. I'm going to sound binary now, but either it has breached those standards or it hasn't.
I think a fair and honest assessment is that it has and that it regularly sails close to the wind.
We may be at risk of a semantic argument here. OfCom uses the word 'impartiality'
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-standards/section-five-due-impartiality-accuracy/
AFZ
Neutrality means reporting honestly and proportionally on the moral failings or moral virtues of both sides, regardless of who funds them or the proprietor's political views. If one side lies every time they open their mouth and the other side maybe stretched the truth in a speech a month ago, then refusing to fact check isn't neutrality, nor is dwelling on each side's departures from strict accuracy for the same amount of time. Both of those are siding with the habitual liar.
The fact that this ideal may be unattainable is not in my view a reason to abandon it. We may always be in the gutter to some extent, but it's disturbing if that becomes a reason to stop looking at the stars.
As @alienfromzog says, we may be getting into semantics.
Recky was a great lad - I played for the same cricket club as him in the early 90s (though not in the same XI). I'll never forget his goal against Northampton in the Cup. Happier days.
A true legend of the game.
Hence my objection to the mention of K**********r H******s.
According to whose moral code?
It's a good job that I am the only person who watches this channel.
A few random thoughts on this.
First, while it may be impossible for any news outlet to achieve total impartiality or total objectivity, I would prefer that outlets at least aspire and try to achieve those qualities.
Second, I think this is more important for television stations than for newspapers and especially for the BBC. Many newspapers openly have a political bias which is widely recognised. Everybody knows that the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are Conservative aligned and that the Guardian back in its Manchester days was Liberal but since it dropped that moniker is now considerably more left-wing. The impression of alignment, though, is particularly heinous when the BBC appears to be slanted because it is supposed not to be, it makes a lot of noise about not being, and it is funded from a license fee rather than the alternative options of either advertisements or people who pay to watch it.
Third, I think that the BBC at the moment abuses its claim to be openhanded and conveys a number of unobjective biases. IMOH this is particularly noticeable in three areas:-
A. On matters of controversy such as climate change and Brexit it is notorious that after somebody has spoken rationally about the science of climate change or the economic and political value of having close ties with the U.K.'s immediate neighbours, some unscientific or ranting climate-denier or Brexitist immediately has to be allowed to have their say, supposedly in the interest of impartiality, even where they represent a position which is objectively nonsensical and can hardly be rationally defended. The BBC regards this as meeting its duty to be impartial, when how that should be exercised is in providing an objective evaluation of the underlying facts with intelligent assessment. It is not being impartial just to treat all opinions as of equal value. Nor is it impartial to assume that simply wheeling out advocates for two binary opposites is sufficient when there are other shades of opinion.
B. Because its bulletins tend to be either half an hour or even at lunchtime 3/4 of an hour, it all too often pads out its time with stuff that is cheap to produce rather than things of genuine news value. It is far too easy to send out some reporter with a camera operator into the street to collect apparently random utterances from passers-by - but of course these are then edited to select members of public have expressed alternative sides of the story - who are happy to moan but who know nothing and have nothing to offer of any merit whatsoever. That is so much easier and cheaper than gathering important but expensive foreign news. This was particularly noticeable during the Covid epidemic. There was next to no coverage of what other countries were doing or experiencing because it was less trouble and far cheaper to send reporters and camera operators into hospitals to get in the way of distraught doctors and nurses.
C. It has got far too habituated into believing that it itself is newsworthy. Too many of its headlines are news about itself. That is treating the national news as a little better than a staff magazine. On one occasion I actually got as far as complaining formally. A third of the C4 lunchtime news was devoted to some row about how male or female reporters were rewarded. Yes that might have been minor interest, but unless a person works for the BBC, it was of no general significance.
There was, though, an even more egregious example recently. The headline item at lunchtime, with most of the bulletins allocated to it, was the scandalous revelations about the late Mohammed Al Fayed. Yes, the revelations were scandalous but the man was dead. It was too late. He was beyond the reach of human justice or vengeance. If somebody was going to have done anything worthwhile about him, they should have done it while he was still alive. It dawned, as the programme proceeded that the reason why this was suddenly their headline that day was a puff for a programme about him and their clever news gathering which they were going to broadcast on the television that evening. And that same day they were very serious floods in central and eastern Europe which ought to have been a major item of news but were hardly mentioned at all.
There are other things I could grumble about, but these will do to be going on with.
There’s sometimes but not always an element of following the papers on stories like this one - and the coverage of European affairs in the print press is usually quite lopsided anyway
Post Gilligan the BBC in particular seems to be nervous about being seen to ignore a story that the press are running with.
So, it doesn't bother you that it has breached OfCom guidelines?
Wouldn't it bother you if the bloke coming to fix your gas boiler regularly breached industry standards?
Or the fella who gives your car an MOT?
Or is OfCom some kind of 'woke', liberal handkerchief wringing outfit which should simply be ignored?
In the interests of balance, there are criticisms I'd also level at other media platforms of course.
But GB News has egregious form and popularity is no defence. Millions of people used to read 'The News of The World' for instance.
No Yes Yes By Gove sir, I think you have it But I keep reading that it's not popular. Should we be concerned that one of the presenters suits come from the 18th century?
Your own bias is showing here. Nothing about Brexit was objective, much less objectively nonsensical.
By that argument Jimmy Saville’s crimes should never have been exposed.
Not true. The legal and trade consequences in the short to medium term were are are objective. As a consequence, the economic consequences could be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy and were also objective.
AFZ
No, but that his views come from the 18th century ... 😉
Thing is, @Telford, I'm not in the least bit bothered whether you vote Conservative, Reform or whatever else. It's a free country and you are entitled to your political views just as GB News is entitled to pander to them ... ahem, I mean cater for them.
What does bother me is your apparent inability to recognise media bias and to dismiss an industry regulator that exists ' albeit toothlessly - to maintain standards which you don't appear to recognise.
You also appear unable to distinguish popularity from populism.
Now don't get me wrong, I think most mainstream media of whatever persuasion needs a good kick up the pants. I was once involved with a charity re-run of a notable 'University Challenge' contest with some of the original participants playing a team of contemporary students. Bamber Gascoigne agreed to take part.
When the regional TV station turned up to cover it, they wanted Gascoigne to take part in a rather silly stunt to add colour to the story. He refused. 'We had standards in broadcasting in my day,' he told them. 'And I'm not going to break them now.'
Ok, so the quirky bit they wanted wasn't full-on 'fake news' as such but it would have involved questions that were not asked during the actual tournament and the 'reconstruction' of scenes that never took place. It would have been a bit of fun and audiences would have clocked that but Gascoigne stuck to his principles and I admired him for it.
He wasn't going to deceive the audience even if it was only a bit of fun.
I relate this story not to have a go at any particular TV channel but to illustrate the need for integrity in broadcasting.
If you don't believe that integrity or adhering to industry standards are important then that's your look out.
As for popularity ... there's the old adage. Eat more shit. 100,000,000 flies can't be wrong.