When impartiality becomes an excuse

The recent decision by BBC Television, followed by Sky News, to refuse to broadcast an appeal for help for the Palestinians sparked impassioned debate. The channels maintained that their action – or rather, the lack of it – was based upon concerns regarding the compromising of their objectivity, and many people agreed. But a great number of people around the world saw in this decision another example of what is commonly but rather simplistically understood as the ‘Western conspiracy’ against Palestinians.
In fact, both sides have a valid point but neither is fully correct in the manner in which they frame the issue. Neither side has extended itself towards understanding the problem properly in terms of its historical context and the resultant ideological frameworks.

To begin with, it is certainly true that principled journalism demands that impartiality be an over-arching priority of any news distributor. If any media organisation takes a side – or is tainted by even the impression that it has taken a side – it can never again be fully trusted as an accurate reporter of events. Reporters, be they individuals or organisations, have a duty to observe and report without bias, from all perspectives.

That said, however, it is also vital to understand and acknowledge that total objectivity is a mirage. It is an ideal that every newsperson or organisation must strive for, of course, but it can never be achieved in its true essence. This is so not only because of the complexity of the human mind and the various strands that inform it, but also because of the complexity of events that are of sufficient significance to be considered news. All news stories are based on facts that are usually undeniable. But those facts are themselves linked to other realities and sets of circumstances that a reporter can choose – or not – to highlight. In the simple act of picking up a story, and in deciding how to report it, one is making a judgment call based on a certain set of biases and assumptions.

Consider, for example, a story on a fire that could not be controlled in time to save a factory. These are the bare facts. But the reporters can choose to frame them in terms of incompetence on the part of the fire department, or the lack of resources available to it, or the factory owner’s insurance policy and financial situation, or the lack of building codes stipulating fire safety, or architectural malpractices – all of which are contextual facts.

So, when the BBC or Sky News say that they are concerned about losing their impartiality, they are right. But they must also not present themselves as totally objective otherwise, for this is not true. As a viewer, a cursory count of the airtime minutes devoted to stories on Israeli and Palestinian suffering leaves me with the certain knowledge that the slant is towards the former. (A similar scan of Al Jazeera, meanwhile, presents the opposite picture.)

At the same time, however, those amongst us who love to postulate the conspiracy theory are also delusional. The manner in which any credible media organisation works, and its ethic of objectivity, prevents it from taking this course. All the media organisations in the West do not get together and decide to cut the Palestinians, or the Muslims, or Africans, or women or what have you, out of their fair share of screen time. Even in a single organisation, all the employees don’t get together to come to a similar decision. There is never any single or all-important decision maker in a news organisation, the final content of which depends in equal measure on everybody involved in the production: reporters, copy, assignment and graphic editors, section heads, owners and even the marketing and circulation division. Any one attempting to set a conspiracy in motion hasn’t really a hope since he’d have to argue it out with dozens of his colleagues, most of whom are nitpicking debaters in the way that only journalists can be. And then he’d face the prospect of viewers or readers turning away from an organisation whose integrity has been compromised.

That said, though, there is a reason why news organisations sometimes display enough of a shared bias to make the suspicious sniff out conspiracy theories: historical context and bias. In terms of the Israel-Palestine issue, it is of vital significance that the United Kingdom has been involved in the matter right from the start. Regardless of various peace deals or ceasefires brokered, the country has historically remained sympathetic towards the settlers. It has sought to bring about a compromise between the parties, perhaps, but has never doubted the ethicality or legality of the initial Israeli takeover of Palestinian land. So, if this has been various governments’ stance, it is only to be expected that the citizenry would absorb the same bias. And who are the people working in news organisations but members of that self-same citizenry, most of whom will have grown up in educational, political and cultural environments that stealthily encouraged a leaning towards one view at the cost of another.

Before the conspiracy theorist goes “Aha!”, I must point out that this sort of ideological indoctrination is a reality of modern times that cannot be blamed on any one person, organisation or society. Here in Pakistan (or in India, for that matter), we have our own blind spots, for example. One of them is called Kashmir. No matter how much objectivity each one of us strives for, our views will always latently be informed by the stance our country’s successive governments have taken towards the issue. This is why, during any debate of Kashmir, no matter how liberal or left-leaning or supposedly impartial the commentator, one finds under the surface the lurking assumption that the land ‘belongs’ to Pakistan, and that even going as far as arguing for self-determination or self-rule is a bit of a noble sacrifice on part of Pakistan.

Just one more point remains to be made: there is journalistic responsibility, but there is also the ethical responsibility that each one of us, newsperson or not, owes as a human being. There are times grave enough for the latter to take precedence, such as what recently took place in the Gaza Strip and the very disturbing precedent it constitutes. It may be wrong for a news organisation to compromise its reputation by taking sides, but it is far, far worse to pretend that the Israelis are the primary victims of the situation as it now stands – that is very far from the truth. The ideal of objectivity must under no circumstances be used as an excuse to sit on the fence while atrocities are committed against the defenceless and the innocent.

As Frere wrote, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means siding with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
By Hajrah Mumtaz