TV news impartiality in the spotlight: Steven Barnett interviewed for Broadcast Now

On the 9 May, 2017 Steven Barnett was featured in an article By Hannah Gannagé-Stewart and published by Broadcast Now. The article and Steven’s comments are reproduced below.

Political impartiality has become increasingly tough for broadcasters, according to former BBC News exec Sue Inglish, speaking in the run-up to the general election.

Inglish, who left her role as head of political programmes after a decade last year, warned that the challenges faced by broadcasters are greater than during the 2015 election.

She said the impact of the polarising Brexit vote had made impartiality more difficult and that growing devolution of power around the nations was having an “absolutely massive” effect on the way in which politics needed to be covered.

“One of the things that has become more difficult since I did the last election in 2015, is how politics has changed,” she said.

Speaking at a Goldsmiths University roundtable on impartiality in broadcast media on Friday (5 May), she said impartiality was “horribly difficult to define [and] even more difficult to achieve”.

Inglish, who caused controversy for giving the British National Party a platform on Question Time in 2009, argued that journalists “care passionately” about impartiality issues but they were being placed under increased pressure by the demands of the 24-hour news cycle.

Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster Steven Barnett added impartiality could be improved partly through employing a more diverse workforce and also by helping to make journalists “sufficiently aware of [their] own political predilections”.

Barnett also called on news broadcasters to conduct more “empirical” research into impartiality – a move he considered “long overdue”.

Journalistic groupthink

Barnett, who has previously acted as a special adviser to the government and Ofcom, claimed that TV reporters’ dependency on newspaper journalism led to “journalistic groupthink”.

He said broadcast journalists frequently failed to “take a critical view of the press that they read” and suggested that newspaper articles were often “recycled” for TV debates.

“All the newspaper programmes, every single political radio programme and virtually every TV news programme at some point will feature today’s headlines, tomorrow’s headlines, yesterday’s headlines,” he said.

“You are talking about an agenda that is being set by the front pages of a national press which is almost unique, not just in its number, but in its political affiliations”.

He urged the BBC to encourage its reporters “not to follow the news cycle but to sit and think”.

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