The TV rules of 'due impartiality'

A new career phase has meant brushing up on old regulations which have never been more important.

This hardly seems the time for career announcements, but many of you have noticed that I’ve been back on TV recently. So I wanted to officially share the news with you, the ‘News with a Foreign Accent’ crew, many of whom have been incredibly supportive.

A few weeks ago I started freelancing as a presenter on Sky News. Sky was my first proper on-air job back in October 2003 as a junior reporter. I’ve always admired their journalism and ethos, so it’s exciting and serendipitous to be back exactly 20 years later almost to the day.

So much has changed in that time: technology; its impact on the way people consume journalism; the proliferation of different voices who can now claim the kind of platform that used to be reserved for the main news providers. Many of those voices deserve to be heard and overall most of the changes have been positive. But not all. Disinformation is rife and the line between opinion and reporting gets blurred all too often. My time away from mainstream news has reinforced my appreciation for fact-based reporting. There’s a place for opinions, but they’re best when based on facts, experience and eyes-on-the-ground rather than ideology.

Presenting from the Sky News studio in West London

It could not have been a more difficult time to step back into news. It’s been just over a month now since the October 7th massacre in Israel by Hamas, and the start of Israel’s retaliatory response against Hamas in the Gaza strip, which is causing enormous suffering to the civilian population. The horrors coming out of the Middle East are soul-destroying even for those of us who are mere observers - the trauma for those directly involved is unimaginable. The effects of this conflict are far-reaching. We have seen hundreds of thousands of people march around the world asking for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile rates of anti-Semitism are increasing sharply, causing genuine fear and anxiety within Jewish communities. There is a sense of watching history unfold.

There is also a rightful focus on the media and on how they tell the story. Empathy with all the innocent victims of this conflict should always be paramount. Being horrified at the violence unleashed by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of hostages is not incompatible with being horrified at the unrelenting pain and death being waged on the children, women and men in Gaza. I firmly believe that those two thoughts can co-exist, though they’re increasingly uneasy bedfellows in these incredibly charged and painful times.

Like all British broadcasters (and unlike the US networks and many others that get lumped into the ‘Western broadcasters’ category ) Sky News is bound by rules of due impartiality. You can read OFCOM’s full explaination of what it means here, but I’ve selected the British regulator’s main guidance on the issue below:

“Due” is an important qualification to the concept of impartiality. Impartiality itself means not favouring one side over another. “Due” means adequate or appropriate to the subject and nature of the programme. So “due impartiality” does not mean an equal division of time has to be given to every view, or that every argument and every facet of every argument has to be represented.

The approach to due impartiality may vary according to the nature of the subject, the type of programme and channel, the likely expectation of the audience as to content, and the extent to which the content and approach is signalled to the audience. Context is important.

OFCOM GUIDELINES

Not favouring a side over another. In other words, not picking a side, though this conflict more than most seems to have pushed people into a binary view of an incredibly complex situation.

Some biases may be inevitable, but there are certainly those who embrace theirs and then there are those who strive for impartiality. They also strive for truth which, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war.

Impartiality. Truth. Context. Compassion. The best guides a journalist can ask for in these incredibly difficult times. They’re more important now than ever.