Impartial

Back to politics. I have found the rage that has been induced by this government has actually calmed recently. Perhaps because my body has told it to? I don’t know. However….I write in defence of the media..

The Media has been subjected to a huge attack in the last few weeks. Accusations of bias, Impartiality, negativity, and perhaps most bizarrely of all…Disloyalty.

What is the media? What is MSM (mainstream media)? Is there a club you must join to be included in this less than useful catch-all phrase? We need to look across the pond to see where much of this fuss has originated from. MSM was really a term for the large conglomerate News Corporations, Fox, News Corps et al. Does that really apply over here? Well perhaps. The oft quoted stat about 80% of newspapers being owned by 5 Billionaires is often touted about, with no apparent basis in fact (Feel free to point me to the source…always interested). Anyway….The accusations of bias seem to me to be rather silly. It’s akin to accusing Sheep of being wooly. Didn’t everyone know that Newspapers took a position? What part of the character assassinations that have been carried out by both tabloid and broadsheet in the name of politicians, Royal Family or celebrity in general did anyone not notice?

The BBC are a different beast of course. The have to show “Due impartiality”. This is not the same as giving equal time to both sides of an argument no matter how absurd one side might be. It seems that some at the BBC have got overly worried about this, and this is why Emily Maitlis was seen to have breached those impartiality rules on Newsnight this week. However, this is the problem isn’t it? One persons impartial is another person’s bias. For every raging leftie, there is a raging rightie (Is that correct?) that will tell you the opposite of the lefite in terms of how the BBC works. I am firmly of the opinion that the BBC is such a massive monolith, that to expect it to speak as one voice in terms of its political slant, is to misunderstand the scale of the organisation. I have been lucky enough to have been at the coalface…witnessed a news broadcast from the gallery. The chances of an inherent bias being passed down to all of those individual departments and desks and regional news departments etc is preposterous. Occasionally, someone’s own bias might show, but to suggest it is a corporate influence is frankly a bit daft. Journalists have to report the facts, but this is not always straightforward….there’s the old adage isn’t there….One person says it’s raining, One person says it’s not. It’s not the journalists job to give equal weight to the two opinions but to look out of the window. I get the point, but in a lot of these instances, we need to realise that the people might be looking out of different windows in different countries. The Journalists job is to report truth as they see it, and we must accept that we may not always agree. That’s life. It is clear to me, that certain BBC journalists and reporters do have opinions, and do have political leanings and this does come across in their reporting. That is something they should try to avoid and try to correct. However, the alternative to what we have seems to me to be a state controlled media.