Ivor Gaber examines the BBC’s Referendum coverage and the false understanding of ‘balance’.
BBC journalists, under their Editorial Guidelines, have an obligation to provide balanced coverage, but what precisely does balance mean in the context?
The BBC has long accepted that when reporting climate change it does not have to seek a balance between the views of most of the world’s scientists and those who deny climate change. But there was no similar judgement made during the EU referendum campaign, resulting in coverage that was, unintentionally, misleading.
The problem was that virtually every BBC radio and television news bulletin that I heard or watched contained a format of ‘balanced’ news that was stupefyingly predictable. A claim by the Remain or Leave campaign was automatically contradicted by a rebuttal from the other side. First, it made for tedious listening and viewing; second, it probably left much of the audience confused; and third left them vulnerable to simplistic slogans, eg £350 million going to the EU instead of the NHS.
Let me offer some examples of this phoney balance. First, just one day before the vote, 1,280 business leaders signed a letter to The Times backing UK membership. This was ‘balanced’ on BBC bulletins with a quote from just one entrepreneur, Sir James Dyson, saying he was in favour of Leave, despite the fact that this ‘news’ had already been broadcast on the 11th June. Nor was there any mention, in the more extensive web report, of Dyson having moved his entire business out of the UK to Malaysia, a background fact highly relevant to the overall story.
Similarly, when on June 20 ten Nobe Prize-winning economists warned of the dangers to the British economy of a Brexit, the BBC ‘balanced’ this story with a quote from just one economist, Patrick Minford – as they had done two days before, with a story of the IMF issuing a similar warning.
The same ‘balance’ was struck the previous month when an Ipsos Mori poll found that 88% of UK economists were against Brexit and once again Professor Minford was quoted contradicting them. As eminent as Minford might be, didn’t the absence of any other leading economists supporting Leave ring even the tiniest of alarm bells?
There was also a problem with campaign visuals. Who can forget the image and slogan on the Leave campaign’s red battle bus? It
was a claim that even Leave supporters have subsequently said should not be taken
too literally.
Rick Bailey, the BBC’s Chief Political Advisor, speaking on Radio 4’s Feedback programme implicitly accepted that the £350 million claim could not be justified. But when asked how TV and Radio news audiences would know this, he referred a Radio 4 programme about statistics, More or Less, that despite its quality, gets a fraction of the audiences for BBC News.
So how ‘balanced’ is it to allow political leaders to appear in front of their own slogans, when this involves a palpably untrue statement being shown day-in-day out? If the campaigners were only prepared to make themselves available in front of the bus then surely the correct editorial decision would have been not to broadcast the footage but
to summarize what the campaigners had to say instead.
So what’s the answer – one-sided partial coverage? No, it’s simpler than that. What I am suggesting is that instead of interpreting balance as meaning “he says, she says” reports, editorial judgement would be better employed by balancing a positive Remain story, not with a rebuttal from Leave but with a positive Leave story, and vice versa. It might make for more work but it should also ensure a better informed electorate, more interesting viewing and, maybe who knows, even bigger audiences for news.
Ivor Gaber is Professor of Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster-based broadcaster and Independent Editorial Adviser to the BBC Trust. A longer version of this article is available at www.referendumanalysis.eu
