3 June 2020

BBC journalists like Emily Maitlis should strive for impartiality, not celebrity

By

The BBC’s editorial neutrality is more important than Emily Maitlis’ claim to speak for the nation’s disgust about Dominic Cummings; and the earlier use, by the BBC1 Breakfast show’s Naga Munchetty, of her personal experience of racism to condemn President Donald Trump. Both presenters put their feelings before their job – which is to employ, in interview and commentary, impartial, informed scepticism.

Putting personal feelings, no matter how deeply held, before a careful and impartial examination of any issue is a direct challenge to editorial neutrality. This matters. Editorial neutrality of a public broadcaster, sustained by the licence fees and free from political or lobby group pressure, remains one of the large democratic innovations of the last century, one which has, until recently, been further strengthened. It is now, however, being challenged – especially from within journalism and the broader media sector, including from within the BBC itself.

Munchetty’s case was in some ways more important than the recent impartiality guidelines breach by Maitlis. In July last year Munchetty reacted to Trump’s remark that four Democratic members of Congress (all women of colour on the left of their party) should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Munchetty, in unscripted remarks, said that “Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism. Now I’m not accusing anyone of anything here, but you know what certain phrases mean”. She was, as she later made clear (“a man in that position”) accusing somebody of something – and that was Trump, of racism.

In September, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit judged that her comments “breached the broadcaster’s impartiality guidelines”. This prompted appeals against the reprimand, including from Sir Lenny Henry, Jeremy Corbyn and several BBC journalists. A few days later, the director general, Lord Hall, reversed the Unit’s decision.

Emily Maitlis’ intervention on Newsnight last week was a sharp criticism of Cummings’ trip to Durham, and, like Munchetty, she claimed to be speaking for “the country”. Opening the programme, she said that “Dominic Cummings broke the rules, the country can see that and it’s shocked the government cannot. The longer ministers and the Prime Minister tell us he worked within the rules, the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be”. Cummings, she continued, “was the man, remember, who always got the public mood, he tagged the lazy label of ‘elite’ on those who disagreed”.

The Complaints Unit again decided that Maitlis had exceeded the guidelines: she later tweeted thanks for support received, but it was markedly less public than in Munchetty’s case. The programme even attracted some media criticism: a former Newsnight presenter, Sir John Tusa, told the Sunday Times that “No editor of Newsnight that I worked with would have allowed that to go through…It is self-indulgence and it does no service to viewers”.

The two presenters’ remarks, and Hall’s cancellation of the first judgment, greatly weaken the Corporation’s commitment to impartiality – Munchetty and Maitlis by privileging their own revulsion, Hall by agreeing that Munchetty’s experience of racism trumped her duty of neutrality. The two presenters had stepped into the celebrity world, in which opinions widely broadcast are part of the currency.

We do get to know about the world from celebrities’ comments, whether acute or vacuous. Yet their comments are understood to aim for higher visibility, and they have no duty of balance. Impartiality, however, is based on a civic ideal: that illuminating an issue or a controversy with close and informed questioning allows citizens to make up their own mind.

But isn’t a President telling four US representatives to go home too outrageous for anything but a condemnation, the more powerfully expressed from the mouth of a woman who had felt the sting of such comments?

No: not on the BBC.

There would be, I guess, many in America who agree with Trump’s comments – core supporters, his base. A tough interview with one of these would be worth listening to. As would questioning one of those whose Trump’s comments were directed to. The response should be theirs, not a BBC presenter’s. It was a shame Lord Hall didn’t understand this, since he’s charged with protecting this jewel in the Corporation’s crown.

Maitlis’ introduction to the Newsnight piece on Cummings was more obviously flawed – though, since the director general didn’t withdraw it, less damaging. It was less “me-journalism” than Munchetty’s, but it was a larger claim to the platform of National Moralist. What was needed from an analytical programme was a solid dissection of how far Cummings went outside the guidance laid down for adults with young children and whether it was reasonable – an examination which would benefit parents in a similar position.

The best such analysis I know of is that done by Leo Benedictus for Full Fact, the UK’s best fact-checking NGO. Benedictus does a careful trawl through the written guidelines, advice by experts and Cummings’ comments at his press conference.

He writes, in summary, that “The guidelines accepted that parents in exceptional circumstances would not be able to follow all the rules, but it is not clear whether this applied to Mr Cummings. Nor did he fully explore the alternatives that might have allowed him to stay in London, which the rules required”. It isn’t a passionate denunciation of an unpopular and powerful man: it’s better than that, because it allows us to see the props on which Cummings could lean and the weaknesses of some of them. This is what BBC journalists, with a duty of impartiality, should be striving for.

Hall’s concession to Munchetty however highlights two pressures on the Corporation. One is the financial temptation of celebrity. Munchetty, at £190,000-195,000 and Maitlis at £260-265,000 in 2019 both earn high salaries – but, as performers with a clear appetite for controversy, would earn much more in the private sector. Piers Morgan, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, earns a reported £1.5m – and has said he earns a total of more than £20m a year from various appearances. He has in the past mocked BBC salaries, asking rhetorically – “do they get out of bed for THAT?” For Munchetty, forced to get up very early and Maitlis, getting to bed late, may feel the sting, and temptation, of that ridicule.

The other is the pull towards opinionated broadcasting. When Mark Thompson was the BBC’s director general, he told a 2010 conference that the public should be able to watch opinionated channels – citing the example of the US’ right-wing Fox Channel.

Many on the right and left agree, for different reasons. Rightists tend to believe that the BBC’s news and current affairs, talk shows, comedy and drama are biased in favour of the liberal left – something quietly admitted by senior BBC staff.

On the left, there is a view, with some traction in the BBC, that certain issues – racism, sexism, prejudice against sexual minorities, denial of global warming – should be identified and condemned editorially, as Naga Munchetty did. They should not be subject to sceptical questioning, for that might in itself show bias.

Now, no impartial broadcaster could or should accommodate a steady diet of right- or left-wing attitudes: that would mean licensing independent, overtly polemical channels. But if we are to keep the invaluable legacy of a national broadcaster striving to be impartial the BBC needs to have a news division at least as well funded as it is now.

Conservatives have talked of reforming the BBC – some, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, favour a subscription model, as the Sky channels have. Though it’s opposed by many within the Party as being potentially unpopular, the Munchetty-Maitlis-Hall trio may hasten the destruction of the licence fee.

It’s disappointing that the director general and high-performance presenters can’t grasp how high the stakes are. And if they can’t, the BBC will continue to make ever-larger compromises between talented presenters’ desire to be talked about, and the civic purpose the impartiality guidelines are meant to support – until, one day, that purpose is lost forever.

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John Lloyd is a Contributing Editor to the Financial Times, ex-editor of The New Statesman and a co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.