The BBC’s impartiality means that it marches in lockstep with establishment opinion rather than challenging it, failing the cardinal journalistic ethic, argues Des Freedman

The BBC‘s position on impartiality, already shredded by its craven and lop-sided coverage of Gaza, has now reached peak madness. Speaking to an audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the director general Tim Davie spoke of the importance of journalists to appear to be impartial on key issues. ‘So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.’

This is the same BBC (though a different director general) who insisted back  in 2019, after a complaint was upheld against one of its presenters, Naga Munchetty, for making critical comments about Donald Trump, that the BBC ‘is not impartial on racism. Racism is not an opinion and it is not a matter for debate. Racism is racism.’

The BBC is so ‘not impartial on racism’ that we are now about to see a whole swathe of red poppies (and very few white ones) on our screens, while any journalist seen wearing a BLM t-shirt will presumably be escorted off the premises and told to be more impartial on racism by dressing appropriately.

Wearing a BLM T-shirt or a Palestinian badge is simply the kind of ‘virtue signalling’ that Tim Davie hates so much. After the director general told journalists to avoid expressing any personal views, one Radio 5 Live presenter broadcaster, Nihal Arthanayake, responded by saying ironically that ‘I won’t be calling racists rude words any more’. Yes, that will really reassure black communities across the country.

Davie’s proscription of overt political statements or affiliations on the basis that it would undermine the BBC’s commitment to impartiality is simply out of step with reality. First, while the director general and head of news may be keen to police what clothing BBC staff can wear, this doesn’t seem to apply to the coverage itself where explicitly political assumptions are routinely aired. In its study of BBC coverage of the Gaza genocide, the Centre for Media Monitoring found that it treated Palestinian deaths as ‘less newsworthy’, suppressed genocide allegations and used emotive terms disproportionately in relation to Israeli, as opposed to Palestinian, deaths. It was, the CfMM concluded, a clear case of ‘double standards’.

Second, it appears to be the case that the BBC is more interested in preserving the appearance of impartiality than in actually delivering impartial reporting. For example, researchers at Cardiff University recently found that members of Reform featured in 25% of all News at Ten bulletins (often including pictures of Nigel Farage in a pub) in the six-month period it analysed, some 50% more than the Liberal Democrats. This has reinforced the opinion of many viewers that the BBC is simply pandering to Reform.

Indeed, it’s revealing that Davie chose to use the example of a BLM T-shirt rather than a Reform badge as an example of inappropriate behaviour for journalists. (To be fair, Davie also said that ‘you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election’ though you have to wonder about the chances of this ever happening again).

Third, the BBC is far better at policing the boundaries of impartiality – in deciding what is ‘politically acceptable’ and what is not – in lockstep with government than it is in challenging established positions. This applies to coverage of Israel just as much as it applies to racism, climate coverage and defence.

Little wonder that in a BBC poll of its own audiences, a whopping 45% of 18-34 year olds said that they didn’t think the BBC was independent of government. Impartiality and bias was identified as the top-cited area in which the BBC needs to improve for respondents between 18 and 54.

Of course this isn’t the first time the BBC has scrutinised the background or clamped down on the conduct or dress of its journalists. For more than fifty years, the BBC operated a vetting system to keep out ‘subversives’ while, more recently, the Corporation banned journalists from attending marches against the 2003 Iraq War.

Now in response to sharp criticism by many of its staff of its coverage of Gaza, the BBC has fostered a culture in which people are nervous to speak out. One of its former presenters, Karishma Patel has spoken of a ‘culture of fear’: ‘I watched too many gently dislocate from the critical journalistic burden of speaking truth to power, or burn themselves out fighting to get good quality work published.’

If this is ‘Our BBC’, then how come so many people who work for it are scared to challenge their bosses and how come so much of the public think it’s not independent of government?

In the end, it’s ‘their BBC’, an institution that tells journalists what they can and can’t wear. It falls way short of impartiality, echoes the government of the day and utterly fails to hold power to account.