The short answer is that I don’t want British broadcasters to turn into the equivalents of British newspapers, or viewspapers as they should more properly be called. The more complicated answer is that I believe the impartiality regulations, albeit interpreted and applied differently than has been the case up to now, remain the best guarantee of trustworthy broadcast journalism, and thus of a politically informed and engaged electorate.

These regulations are much the same for all broadcasters. Opinions should be clearly distinguished from facts; broadcasting organisations must refrain from editorialising; and, overall, a sense of balance must be maintained. With regard to this last stipulation, the ITC Programme Code states that “in dealing with major matters of controversy, licensees must ensure that justice is done to a full range of significant range of views and perspectives during the period in which the controversy is active”, The BBC Producers Guidelines remind programme makers to ensure that “over a reasonable period of time they have done justice in their area to the range of views and interests”, and the Radio Authority News and Current Affairs Code lays down that “an appropriate range of views on controversial subjects should be reported fairly either within a single news bulletin or in a series of news bulletins which are as adjacent as reasonably possible”.

This matter of range and balance brings us to the heart of the impartiality question. Once upon a time, achieving balance was largely a matter of giving Tory and Labour representatives equal airtime, and occasionally throwing in the odd Liberal or Nationalist for good measure. This gave rise to the entirely justified charge that broadcasters were operating with an extremely narrow, Westminster-oriented conception of politics, and were thus routinely excluding – and indeed, on occasions, demonising – political personalities, views and organisations that did not fit into their conventional notion of what constituted “proper” political discourse. In the 1970s, broadcast coverage of Northern Ireland, the nuclear issue, and industrial conflict, for example, provided ample fuel for such a critique, as did the Falklands War and the coal dispute in the 1980s.

The root of their harrumphings

However, I’m not aware of any research which shows that significant sections of the population desire opinionated news and current affairs programmes. On the contrary. According to the recent ITC/BSC research report New News, Old News, 71 per cent of those questioned thought the principle of impartiality in news very important, and 91 per cent thought the impartiality regulations a good thing. Meanwhile the ITC/BSC annual publication, The Public’s View 2002, reported that for 70 per cent of respondents, television was their most trusted source of UK news, with newspapers scoring a mere 6 per cent. In all, only 19 per cent of respondents perceived any form of political bias on television.

What all this suggests, in my view, is not that the broadcasters themselves should become more opinionated but, quite simply, that a much wider range of interviewees and subjects should, as a matter of routine, be included in news and current affairs programmes. In this respect, some of Radio 4’s enlightening reports from Cancun were a refreshing change from previous negative and ill-informed accounts of anti-globalisation protests, and Today’s experiment with guest editors ranging from Norman Tebbit to Thom Yorke was exemplary in that, while remaining balanced in the way in which news items were dealt with, the programme managed to escape from the usual narrow, Westminster-dominated, Anglo-centric political agenda. But there again, it was Christmas and nothing was happening in Parliament. And on the debit side, BBC and ITV coverage of the anti-war movement both before and during the invasion of Iraq showed, once again, all too clearly what happens when the notion of balance is interpreted in the old, narrow, political sense. Protests were frequently downplayed, ignored or even demonised because, with the war being supported by Parliament, these were all too easily dismissed as unrepresentative or even “extremist”. However, Channels 4 and 5 presented a very different picture of these events, the latter even employing an anti-war correspondent.

The impartiality regulations, then, don’t necessarily make for conformist, or even simply bland and boring broadcasting. Indeed, if they were interpreted as requiring the balanced presentation of a genuinely wide and diverse range of views from across the whole political spectrum, and not simply the Westminster one, then it’s possible that they could considerably re-invigorate news and current affairs programming in this country.

On the other hand, we could simply ditch them altogether as being no longer necessary in a multi-channel environment. However, anybody advocating this course of action should first listen to “shock jocks” such as Nick Ferrari on LBC, John Gaunt on BBC London, and almost anyone on talkSPORT. This is to enter a world in which, frankly, the impartiality regulations have already ceased to exist, and in which numerous complaints upheld by the various pre-Ofcom regulators appear to have been entirely ignored. This is not a world in which a thousand ideological flowers bloom in a deregulated Eden, but one in which oafish, loud-mouthed, bullying presenters appear to have complete freedom daily to peddle views which make The Sun look positively liberal, and to shout down and belittle all those who have the temerity to disagree with them. Ofcom, please note.

Those against our current impartiality regulations might also like to ponder the Federal Communications Commission’s suspension, in 1987, of the “Fairness Doctrine” in the United States, which led not to greater freedom of speech and an explosion of investigative journalism but to an intensification of the “shock jock” phenomenon, the triumph of the loudest and richest, and, ultimately, the blatantly biased Fox News.

Finally, they might like to ask themselves just why it is that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers have been the loudest and most consistent advocates of abolishing the impartiality regulations. In part, this is just another aspect of Murdoch’s relentless war against the BBC, providing tame columnists such as Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times with another opportunity to lambast it for its “pseudo-objectivity” beneath which lurks a “suffocating liberalism”. But the real reason is that Murdoch wants to turn Sky News into a UK version of Fox News, but finds himself stymied by the impartiality regulations. Thank goodness.

Ruthless cross-promotion

Advocates of maintaining the impartiality regulations should not, of course, forget the considerable ideological problems stemming from the way in which they’ve been interpreted and enforced in the past – and still sometimes are in the present. On the other hand, those that support their complete abolition need to remember Belloc’s advice: “Always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse.” They also need to take a long, hard look at the changed market realities of broadcasting, before, out of the best of motives, risking sending British broadcasting hurtling down the same road as much of the British press.