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5 June 1990
House of Lords
Selected extracts from debate on Broadcasting Bill
"due impartiality" (as outlined in Clause 6)
Taken from Hansard volume 519, beginning at column 1220
3.17 p.m.
Home Office Minister Earl Ferrers [Conservative] opened the debate on the Broadcasting Bill and spoke for 21 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
3.38 p.m.
Opposition front bench spokesman Baroness Birk [Labour] spoke for 22 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
4.00 p.m.
Lord Thomson of Monifieth [former Labour MP and former chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority] spoke for 18 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
4.18 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Peterborough [chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council] spoke for 12 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
4.30 p.m.
Lord Aylestone [former Labour MP and chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority] spoke for 17 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
4.47 p.m.
The Earl of Stockton [chairman of major publishing company MacMillan] spoke for 13 minutes without mentioning impartiality. He nevertheless said:
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I do not believe that it is the business of Parliament to limit, more than it absolutely has to, what should be broadcast, what programmes should be made, how much or how little they should be bowdlerised and whether they are acceptable to the public or not any more than it is the business of parliament, within the basic laws of a civilised society, to tell the people what they should read, what they should think or what they should believe…
5.00 p.m.
Baroness Blackstone [chairman of the General Advisory Council of the BBC] spoke for 14 minutes without mentioning impartiality. She nevertheless said:
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The future of broadcasting is of great importance. It is important because the nature of broadcasting is central to the survival of a healthy democracy, and also because the quality of people's lives is greatly affected by the output of broadcasters. Television and radio are the most important sources of news and information for most people…
5.14 p.m.
The Earl of Glasgow [a former Yorkshire TV and BBC TV documentary producer and director] spoke for 9 minutes without mentioning impartiality.
5.23 p.m.
Lord Annan [former chairman of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting], spoke for 19 minutes during which he addressed the issue of impartiality thus:
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…Another matter worries me and some of my friends in the House: impartiality. There is no question about the need to make the news impartial, but some people are worried - and I understand this well enough - about one-sided presentations in current affairs programmes and in phone-in documentaries. Where I part company with my friends is that they think that every programme must be balanced and impartial and, it goes without saying, every series such as "Panorama" or "World in Action" should be equally impartial.
I believe that we should be the losers if an undoubtedly biased series such as "World in Action" - which is currently biased not so much against Labour or against Conservatives as against authority in all its forms - were emasculated. The Bill states that due impartiality should be observed only on current industrial and political controversy. It allows history therefore to be at the mercy of the producer.
Much as I dislike seeing Miss Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth I speaking in the tones of a Rodean prefect of the 1920s, I disliked even more the Channel 4 programme on the resistance movement in Greece. In it, the communist partisans, ELAS, were portrayed as the sole liberators of their country who had been hampered at every step by the British liaison officers in Greece. This party, ELAS, was portrayed as representing the true desires of the Greek people, monstrously stopped from governing their country by the British army.
Worse still, the interviews of the British liaison officers such as Colonel Monty Woodhouse and Captain Nigel Clive, were so distorted by cutting that Mr. Jeremy Isaacs, head of Channel 4, was forced to apologise to them. That is bad for my blood pressure but I do not see how it can be avoided, particularly, I regret to say, as that programme was entirely faithful to the interpretation of history made by Mr. Papandreou, the prime minister of Greece, and his party, PASOK, then the government of the country. Their version of history was being taught
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in Greek schools. Even so, our belief in free speech demands that such programmes be made.
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