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THE GUARDIAN 
Friday, 28 September 1990

'Personal view' programmes face test on impartiality

Georgina Henry
Media Editor
RIGHTWING peers are planning further attempts to tighten the definition of political impartiality when the Broadcasting Bill returns to the House of Lords for its report stage early next month.
    The Home Office is expected to publish an amendment to the controversial clause about impartiality on Monday.  The amendment is the result of a campaign in the Lords led by Lord Orr-Ewing, Lord Wyatt and Baroness Cox, fierce critics of alleged leftwing bias in the BBC and ITV. 
    Lord Orr-Ewing said he was concerned that the amendment did not cover "personal view" programmes.  "We are thinking of bringing forward a further amendment to try to pin this down," he said.
    "David Mellor [the Arts Minister responsible for the bill] says it is not needed because it is already clearly implied by the amendment.  But it is needed on the face of the bill because dissident programme-makers get round impartiality by saying it is a personal view."
    The Home Office argues that it is legally impossible to draft a specific "personal view" clause into the bill.
    Lord Orr-Ewing said that he expected at least a "firm and clear" statement in Parliament that personal view programmes were not immune to impartiality.  There could also be an attempt to make the amendment applicable to the BBC; at the moment it relates only to commercial television, although Mr Mellor has said the BBC must take "due cognisance" of it.
    The new amendment lists the areas that a code on impartiality - to be drawn up by the Independent Television Commission - will cover.  The code must make provision for:

• identification of the ingredients that make a programme impartial;


• how impartiality can be achieved in connection with different types of programmes;


• balancing programmes on individual issues: one "leftwing" programme must be matched with a programme on the same issue, not by a "rightwing" programme on another issue;


• the timescale for balancing programmes. The Home Office has avoided a statutory time scale;


• defining what constitutes a series within which impartiality can be achieved; prominence given to balancing material; and details of dates and times of subsequent programmes to be given at the time of the first programme or as advance notice by other means.

The amendment includes the qualification that "due impartiality does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental moral and constitutional values."  Broadcasters have strong reservations about the amendment, although privately they admit it could have been much worse.  They have already told Mr Mellor that it opens the way to legal challenge by political groups on left and right.  One senior broadcaster said: "As soon as you particularise on the face of the bill, as this amendment does, you undermine the discretion of the regulatory authority.  "The trouble is it can be read in many different ways, and in the end this will lead to cautious programming."

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