When broadcasting fairness and balance isn't fair or balanced

When broadcasting fairness and balance isn't fair or balanced - Roy Greenslade  Professor of Journalism at City University London 

Just before the referendum campaign got under way, he noted that the assistant political editor of BBC News, Norman Smith, had said that the facts on the EU were “elusive.” 

Not so, tweeted McKee at the time, “they are easy to find. It’s just that #VoteLeave have lied consistently.” 

He regarded the Smith statement as a typical example of the BBC’s “fairness bias”, an assumption that “claims cannot be objectively verified and everything is a matter of opinion.” He wrote: 

“Crucially, this approach places the views of people who, by virtue of their long years of studying an issue and familiarity with it, on a par with those who have only thought about it perhaps a few hours earlier.” 

To underline his point he quoted Aaron Sorkin, creator of the West Wing and Newsroom TV series: “If the entire House Republican caucus were to walk on to the floor one day and say ‘the Earth is flat,’ the headline in the New York Times the next day would read ‘Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.’” 

While conceding that it is important to hear all sides of an argument he thought viewers and listeners would be misled when one side in a debate “is simply implausible or demonstrably untrue.”