Former BBC editors have warned that the corporation’s younger journalists do not understand that their reporting should be impartial. A former head of BBC television news even claimed that younger staff are confusing impartiality with social justice.
According to The Telegraph today:
A generation that has grown up with social media believes that being impartial and saying what they think is right are the same things.
Giving evidence to a House of Lords committee, Roger Mosey, the former head of BBC Television News, said: “Some younger journalists don’t understand it in the way it was classically imbued into BBC journalists over the years.”
Richard Sambrook, former head of newsgathering at the corporation, is now a professor of journalism and said his students don’t see impartiality in the same way that older generations do.
“I talked to students about impartiality… and they may say, ‘Well, fairness is about social justice.’ You have to try to reframe the argument. With identity politics, they have a very different concept of what is right,” he said.
“We’re in a culture of calling things out. They are a generation who do not see it in quite the same way.”
Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, said the BBC’s culture of turning news presenters into celebrities could be a threat to impartiality.
I taught radio production at college level. If a student of mine had said to me that fairness is about social justice, I would have ripped him/her a new one.
Fairness is about ensuring that the listener/reader is presented with every side of the story/argument and left to form their own opinion.
In the present paradigm, that should mean that scientists who oppose lockdowns, vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are afforded equal time alongside government advisers.
In my MSM days, it would have been impossible for government scientists to come on the radio and advocate lockdowns, mask wearing and social distancing and not be challenged.
They would have been compelled to appear with doctors and academics who opposed them. Listeners would have never heard my opinion.
That was journalism. That was then. This is now.
