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THE GUARDIAN
Monday, 9 July 1990
This week the House of Lords will debate clause six of the Broadcasting Bill, the subject of several amendments from Lords Wyatt and Orr-Ewing which would significantly tighten the existing requirements for broadcasters to make programmes of 'due impartiality'. Paul Bonner reports
Debate in the balance
WISDOM and folly sit side by side in the House of Lords. But in all such random distribution, clusters occur. And a cluster of folly appears to be joining the Lords Wyatt and Orr-Ewing in their attempts to amend the Broadcasting Bill to ensure that television programmes are "impartial" and "objective".
One person's lofty objective view can be another person's dangerous propaganda. There is no such thing as an impartial view in life. Or in broadcasting, which reflects life. Sir Huw Wheldon used to observe: "Broadcasting is a mirror of society and at any given time some of us are bound not to like what we see in the mirror."
Wheldon was still presenting children's programmes when Wyatt was a Panorama presenter in the 1950s ("Thank you so much, Minister, for finding time to speak to the viewers"). By the time Wheldon was commanding the BBC television service in the sixties, Wyatt had long departed the broadcasting scene, and the world had become more demanding in its respect for viewers' intelligance(sic) and for editorial judgment.
In 1960, the BBC started a series called Gallery. It appeared only two years after the abandonment of the idiotic "14-day rule", under which anything that might formally be the business of Parliament in the next fortnight could not be discussed on radio or television: for fear, presumably, of illuminating the minds of the legislators.
But when Gallery began in 1960 many other arcane rules still survived. They were not unlike those proposed by the Wyatt/Orr-Ewing amendments.
If a discussion in those days contained any political content, then MPs from the two major parties had to appear regardless of whether they had any relevant contribution to make. Frequently, the third party (the Liberals) also insisted on appearing. The confrontations that resulted were predictably aggressive and seldom did justice to the issues.
Gallery was supposed to deal exclusively with politics. At 26, I was a junior member of the programme's production team. This was led by John Grist, now controller of broadcasting at the House of Commons; Jack Ashley, now 20 years a Labour MP; Tony Smith, now president of Magdalen College Oxford; and Margaret Douglas, now political assistant to the BBC's director-general.
The team and its advisers, Norman Hunt and Robert McKenzie, saw the dangers of confrontational discussions leading to over-simplification of the political issues. There were restraints to political coverage in proper depth and detail embodied in the then rules of balance at the BBC. Step by step we tried to move towards more effective coverage.
I remember mounting a discussion about conscience and discipline in the Labour Party - the peg was the annual ritual of Michael Foot voting against the defence estimates.
"Whom are you going to have with Michael?" enquired one of the Lime Grove thought police at a meeting. "Bert Bowden" (the Labour Chief Whip), I replied. "And whom from the Conservatives?" I argued that a Conservative MP could say little of relevance in such a discussion and would merely take up time more valuably used to explore the subject in hand: the relationship between an MP's conscience and the will of his party.
I was supported by John Grist and the editor of news and current affairs, and so the first political studio discussion which was unbalanced in representation but balanced in its approach to the subject reached the screen.
Now, nearly 30 years later - and more than 30 years since Lord Wyatt's experience of television - programmes are much more sophisticated in their approach. Now there is investigative journalism. If their lordships do not approve, then they are out of tune with the majority of the population, who, research shows, value the revelations in defence of their rights of programmes like The Cook Report and That's Life.
Investigative journalism can seldom be balanced. There have been errors, a tendency to trial by television or, occasionally, investigation that has not stood up to scrutiny. But broadcasters do work to rigorous guidelines to try to avoid errors and excesses. There is also the effect of the Peter Jay/John Birt "mission to explain", which has, in the main, benefited the explanation and understanding of difficult issues.
Channel 4 has developed the process further. Its determination to do justice to difficult and unpopular arguments has meant that balance might only be reached in terms of two or three years, rather than within any series. We believed it was a major step forward in respect for the viewer's own judgment as well as for the breadth and depth of the information conveyed.
One of the amendments which Lord Orr-Ewing has put his name to would also rule out a type of programme which Channel 4 has pioneered the "personal view" programmes, which would not be exempt from the impartiality provisions.
The most recent innovation, the televising of Parliament, has also found editors seeking to catch the balance of the debate, not the balance of the House in the simplistic numerical way sought by the Wyatt/Orr-Ewing amendment.
As for the proposal that any programme lacking due impartiality should be followed by a discussion offering the opposing views, it is not for the Broadcasting Complaints Commission to seek to insist on a reply demanded by General Galtieri during the Falklands war, by Sinn Fein supporters after virtually every report from Northern Ireland, by Colonel Gadafy after the This Week special on Semtex, and by child abusers after The Cook Report on the subject? The Wyatt/Orr-Ewing amendments must be rejected or political debate on the medium most suited to it will be set back 30 years.
Paul Bonner, founder programme controller at Channel 4, is director of programme planning at the ITV Association.
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