News organizations professing
professionalism are keen to establish themselves as independent impartial
platforms where panoply of views is fairly presented. In their codes of ethics
and editorial guidelines, news organizations willingly (and in some cases as a
legal requirement)[1]
emphasize their practice of ‘impartiality’ along with other values such as
accuracy, objectivity, factuality, and informative-ness. Yet, very few actually
do elaborate on impartiality, as a journalistic value and as a practice; failing
to clearly explain ‘how to be impartial’ and how to assess impartiality through
“specific evaluative criteria or methodologies.” (Stavitsky & Dvorkin, 2007)
While ‘impartiality’ is an established tradition (at
least in theory) of news media in most countries of the West, whether voluntarily
through news organizations’ codes of ethics, or involuntarily as a legal
requirement, news organizations in developing parts[2] of
the world, including the Arab countries, lack the inclusion of impartiality in
their editorial guidelines and arguably in their practice.[3] In
an exceptional democracy like Lebanon, practicing impartiality is required by
law and it is closely monitored around elections’ time. In 2002, the Lebanese
Channel, MTV, was ordered by court to fold for chargers of “promoting a
parliamentary candidate, its owner Gabriel, violating rules prohibiting
campaign advertising in the final stretch of an election race.” (NCEL, 2006) Most Arab-based international news organizations seem reluctant to explicitly
state the word ‘impartiality’ in their editorial principles and guidelines. The
Qatari owned international news broadcaster, Al-Jazeera, for instance, puts ‘impartiality’
rather implicitly in its published code of ethics which says: “Present the
diverse points of view and opinions without bias and partiality”. Al-Jazeera’s
Code of Ethics, which is published on its website, lists the principles without
much elaboration on the practice of such principles. “Al-Jazeera television is
not subject to the full requirements of the Broadcasting Act. The channel can
only be regulated by the ITC under the EU’s Television without Frontiers Directive.
It can be regulated for incitement to violence but not for impartiality.” (IPPR,
2001)
Nevertheless, the very few news
organizations, such as the BBC and Australia’s SBS
and ABC, which provide a more
detailed version of impartiality guidelines have not helped much by creating
what is called ‘due impartiality’[4] through
which it (the BBC) sets itself free from practicing “absolute neutrality on
every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” (BBC, 2012)
Whether it is the BBC’s ‘due impartiality’,
that gives a room of flexibility to the practice of neutrality, or it is
Al-Jazeera’s implicit reference to ‘impartiality’, both make it even more
difficult to predict how impartiality will be practiced in two possibly
re-occurring settings: when covering
wars/conflicts where the country of the news organization is involved, and when
covering internal conflicts in countries striving for democracy.
Media Impartiality at War time
During the Iraqi war, Richard M. Bridges, a retired US
army colonel, published an article in the US Army Magazine titled “‘Maintaining
Impartiality in War Reporting: Imperative or Impossible?’ Bridges started his
article by pointing out that neither CNN nor Al-Jazeera were impartial in
covering the Iraqi war. “While CNN-International smarted under the criticism of
Arab countries for its pro-coalition news coverage during the latest Iraqi
conflict, Qatar-based Al-Jazeera suffered charges of pro-Saddam Hussein
coverage from coalition countries and liberated Iraqis.” For CNN, by having the
station’s reporters embedded with the coalition troop, it was likely that their
objectivity had been affected. “Embedded
reporters, if left with a unit for any length of time, naturally become part of
the unit as they get acquainted with its members over time and experience the
horrors of war shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers.” (Bridges, 2003) Bridges
recalled hearing CNN’s Walter Rodgers using the word “we” and he thought this
confirmed the benefits embedding journalists bringing to the military. Yet when
it came to impartiality, he said it “is something that the anchors and editors,
who are trying to create a big picture view of the conflict through the reports
of embedded reporters, are obligated to achieve, but not something those
individual reporters in the field are likely to be able to do.”
Bridges also recalled watching on a CNN-International
panel suggesting “that if the nation is in a war for its survival, such as
Britain during the Blitz, then the nation’s reporters have every right to
report the government’s side of the conflict and ignore the enemy’s…but the
conditional nature of this degree of impartiality would also be a little
difficult to regulate. Who would define the point at which survival was in
question?” (Bridges, 2003)
Media coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003 was analyzed
by Kai Hafez, a researcher with University of Erfurt in Germany, with the purpose of finding out if a
country's participation in war has made a difference to their respective media
systems and if impartiality and objectivity would still be endorsed in a
country that goes to war? Hafez noted that “CNNI was surely not completely
balanced.” He analysed the coverage of one afternoon on CNNI to find out that
“it was packed with voices from the pro-war forces.” “Although that same day
there were big demonstrations all around the world against the war, anti-war
voices were almost absent from the program or reduced to little news slots.”
(Hafez, 2004)
Commenting
on the US networks’ coverage of the war, the BBC’s Chief, Greg Dyke, said that
they not only revealed a clear pro-American bias, but that many of them were
outright patriotic and heated up public opinion.” (Hafez, 2004)
Contrary to CNN’s partial (pro-US) coverage of the
Iraqi war, the BBC during the Suez Canal Crisis in 1956 willingly[5]
fought another battle to protect its impartiality against pressures of
patriotism and national interest practiced by the UK government. During the
Suez Canal Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel, attacked Egypt following
Egyptian President Nasser’s decision to seize the canal and bring it under
Egypt’s control, BBC came under fire from the UK government headed by Sir
Anthony Eden. Eden, as the Prime
Minister, was given time by the BBC to speak and justify the attack against
Egypt. The BBC also gave time to Hugh Gaitskell, the head of the opposition, to
talk against the attack. In giving airtime to both sides, the BBC wanted to
simply practice impartiality.[6]
But, “It brought the accusation from Eden that the BBC was betraying the nation
at a time of crisis.” (Rawlinson, 2003
& Shaw, 2009) Such an accusation of betraying the nation might have been escalated
and become more serious if the BBC had given time, for example, to the spokesperson of the Egyptian Government, an enemy at that
time, but surprisingly the ITV took this extra step in 1982 when it interviewed
the Argentinean leader General Leopoldo Galtieri, and was heavily criticised for giving voice to enemy. (Elstein,
2003)
In a
seminar titled “New News: Maintaining quality, impartial broadcast news in the
UK at war and at peace, organized by the Institute for Public Policy, Richard
Tait, a former editor with the BBC and the current Editor-in-Chief of ITN said,
“If you are a British broadcaster, you are in British society. The public does
not expect British broadcasters to be absolutely impartial in times of war.” (IPPR,
2001)
But
then again, the same impartiality gave BBC a ground to stand on: “During the
1982 Falklands when the government of Margaret Thatcher sent a military force to
recover a group of islands in the South Atlantic, the BBC’s chairman and
director-general were howled down at a meeting with Conservative MPs after BBC
news broadcasts had declined to simplify combatant status into crude “them” (‘Argies’ or Argentineans) and
“us” (Brits).” (Elstein,
2003)
Then,
how impartiality is put into practice under such circumstances? How do news
organizations practise impartiality when their own country is part of the war,
invading or being invaded? Perhaps as David Elstein, Chairman of Open Democracy
and the Broadcasting Policy Group, said, “The state broadcasters, caught in the
crossfire between expectations of impartiality and the exigencies of modern war
reporting, found themselves inadvertent combatants in the struggle for public
opinion.” (Elstein,
2003)
Media Impartiality, Democracy and Human
Rights
The second setting where the practice of impartiality
deemed complex is in covering internal conflicts in countries striving for
democracy, where human rights are violated, violence is committed against
political activists, and freedom of speech is limited or even doesn’t exist. In
the absence of local media that is free and capable of reporting such
violations[7],
international news media organizations take charge. In a published interview
with the International Council on Human Rights Policy, the President of the
United States National Endowment for Democracy said, “We are living through an
age when democracy and human rights are on the agenda, everywhere. People are
demanding their rights. People are demanding governments based on democratic
and legal principles. So naturally, much foreign news reporting is concerned
with human rights issues.” (The International Council on Human Rights
Policy, 2002)
However, international news media coverage
of such circumstances is often affected by two variables: ideologies dominant
in their own societies versus ideologies of other societies they cover; (for
example democracy versus communism or democracy versus authoritarianism) and
how distant or proximate their reporters/editors are to the reality of human
rights violations.
The 1990s witnessed a wave of democratizing
of Eastern European countries where communist regimes collapsed one after
another and in 2011- 2012, the world has witnessed another wave of
democratization of the Arab region that took down four Arab dictators so far. Foreign
(transnational) news media organizations played, in both instances, active
roles that were not only limited to covering the crucial events of the
collapsing regimes, but contributed - to a great extent – to the creation of
contagious revolts. Such a (widespread) idea makes it important to question the
impartiality of such international news organizations.[8] As
mentioned earlier, ideologies dominant in their own societies could create ‘ideologically
constrained impartiality’; when “There are circumstances in which impartiality
would be inappropriate, or should be attenuated notably, in cases where
democratic values are judged to be under attack. This permitted derogation has
proved controversial in the BBC’s past reporting of civil or international
conflicts, such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland or the Gulf War, when
deviation from impartiality was seen as justified by the BBC, because the
opposing side was defined by the state as an enemy of democracy.” (Flood,
Hutchings, Miazhevich, Nickels, 2010)
Beside ‘ideologically constrained
impartiality’, emotional/human distance or proximity of reporters/editors to
the reality of human rights violations is another factor affecting their
impartiality. In closed regimes and under dictatorships, sensitivity grows at
times of tensions towards international news organizations whose correspondents
are usually denied access (visa) to these countries. Local reporters and
citizen journalists appear to be an alternative to their ‘international’,
professional journalists.[9]
International news organizations’ dependency on local reporters and citizen
journalists who live under dictatorship and who might be themselves victims of
human rights violations puts their impartiality in question.
Looking at media coverage of the ongoing uprising in Syria, Mona Naggar
of Doha Center for Media Freedom says, “Independent reporting is almost
impossible. Foreign media such as Al Jazeera or BBC, base their coverage on
videos shot by demonstrators or local residents and conduct telephone
interviews with people on the ground. On the ground in Syria, Al Jazeera's
offices have been shut, its journalists are threatened and one web journalist,
Dorothy Parvaz, is being detained since her arrival at Damascus airport.”
A study by the International Council on
Human Rights Policy stated that “Few journalists would claim to be impartial
between the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations.” Ghanaian
journalist and academic, Kwame Karikari, believes that journalists do report on
human rights in an overtly partisan way as part of a general movement for more
freedom in their societies. “The reason for this partisan approach is probably
the fact that many journalists in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern
Europe were themselves recently participants in struggles for human rights.”
(The International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2002) Hossam Al-Hamalawy, an
Egyptian journalist and a blogger, has put it quite straightforward when he
said, “In a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of
activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation.”
Complex Impartiality and the Way Forward
With so much complexity surrounding
‘impartiality’ as a journalistic value and as a practice, the Economist
published an article titled ‘Impartiality: The Foxification of news’ where it
argued that impartiality is “the exception rather than the rule” and stated
that many European and non-European
media are not impartial. “State-run television channels often have partisan
allegiances: Italy’s three state channels are each aligned with specific
parties, for example…In India 81 of the 500 satellite-TV channels that have
sprung up in the past 20 years are news channels, most of them catering to
specific political, religious, regional, linguistic or ethnic groups.” (The Economist, 2011)
Caroline Thomson, the Chief Operating
Officer of the BBC also said, “A BBC Trust report recognized that in today’s
Britain, with all its cultures, beliefs and identities, impartiality is no
longer simply a “seesaw” balancing one side of a clear argument against
another. Achieving it in our increasingly complex society requires even more
than the usual mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance,
even-handedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigor, self-awareness,
transparency and truth. It requires breadth of view and completeness. It is
often achieved by bringing extra perspectives to bear, rather than limiting
horizons or censoring opinion.”[10]
And if impartiality is that complex and seems to be “the exception rather than the rule”, the Economist’s piece points out to Jay Rosen’s [11] suggestion “to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience.” (The Economist, 2011)
Acknowledging the limits of objectivity, “George Orwell (English novelist and journalist) never suggested in his reporting on the Spanish Civil War that he was anything but a supporter of the Spanish Republic, and his reporting acknowledged that he aided, as activist and soldier, this side. Yet he was truthful, and part of the reason is the openness with which he acknowledged the limits of his objectivity.” (The International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2002)
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[1]“Impartiality for the BBC is not in question. It is a given – a
legal requirement, just as it is for other broadcasters in Britain.” (From
Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century, BBC Trust)
[2] According
to UN Human Development Index 2011, three Arab countries (UAE (30), Qatar (37)
and Bahrain (43) are among the top 50 most developed countries in the world.
[3]
“The credibility of the news writers and political columnists in the media
tends to be lower than in the West. They are frequently suspected of being
politically motivated rather than professionals dedicated solely to accurate,
factual reporting and enlightenment of the public” (Rugh, 2004)
[4] The requirement to show `due impartiality' was incorporated in the BBC
Licence in 1996 and prior to that date; the BBC had voluntarily accepted the
obligation. (Barendt, 1998)
[5] It is only after 1996 when
impartiality has become a legal requirement for the BBC.
[6] “Al-Jazeera’s Yosri Fouda argued
that the World Service’s reputation in the Arab world was established with its
impartial coverage of the Suez crisis and he believes that this perception
continues and has been maintained throughout the present conflict.” (IPPR, the
Institute for Public Policy Research news summit in 2001)
[7] John Sweeney, a leading feature
writer at The Observer says,“I consider myself a human rights journalist. I
tell stories people, including powerful people, do not want told… I must use my
freedom [as a British journalist] to say things local journalists cannot say.”
(The International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2002)
[8] “The view that Western mass media played a major role in the demise of
communism is widespread… Western mass media covered crucial events in communist
countries, playing them back to domestic audiences behind the Iron Curtain.”
(Kern, 2007)
[9] “The so-called Arab Spring has been
described as an electronic revolution. Protesters were turned into citizen
journalists - taking frontline images on their mobile phones and uploading them
via their computers for the world to see. The regimes may have jammed the
signals of satellite news channels and banned international reporters from
entering their country, but they were unable to prevent citizens from becoming
reporters in their own right.”
(Al-Jazeera, 2011)
[10] New Statesman Debate, August 31st,
2009
[11] Jay Rosen is Chair of New York
University’s Journalism Department
Yomna Kamel
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