Diversity needs to be at the centre of any review into BBC’s impartiality and guidelines on the use of social media.
On Monday 11th March the BBC’s Director General, Tim Davie, announced that an independent review will be carried out on examining the corporation's social media guidelines.
On Sunday 26th March the Labour Party announced its own BBC review panel. The brief of Labour’s panel covers several areas ahead of the BBC’s next charter renewal in 2027, but again one of the key issues is impartiality.
Even before they start it is easy to pick holes and be cynical about both proposed reviews:
How independent can a review into the BBC really be when the BBC itself sets up the terms of reference and will decide who sits on it?
Can a Labour review with three of the announced four members heavily associated with the Party (James Purnell, Lou Cordwell and June Sarpong) really be expected to be free of bias when reviewing issues such as impartiality and political interference?
The announcement of both reviews come in the wake of the Gary Linekar Twitter controversy, where the BBC initially suspended him for Tweeting about the government’s rhetoric around immigration only to reinstate him less than a week later. Irrespective of any criticisms of how either review has been set up or will operate, what they clearly point to is the growing need for a review into the BBC’s editorial guidelines, with specific reference to how it interprets and implements the principle of “due impartiality”.
However, what most people seem to be missing in all the discussions around BBC impartiality is the centrality of diversity.
Over the last three and a half years the BBC has made four major public editorial U-turns around the issue of impartiality. All four of them have been about diversity and/or minoritised groups:
In October 2019 the BBC reversed its ruling that Breakfast News presenter, Naga Munchetty, had broken editorial guidelines when discussing whether one of President Trump’s Tweets was racist.
In August 2020 the BBC finally apologised for one of its news reporters using the N-word after initially defending the decision.
In October 2020, in what the BBC described as a “clarification” as opposed to a “U-turn”, the corporation said that staff would be allowed to attend Pride marches and this would not compromise their impartiality after initially saying they would not.
And finally in March 2023, the BBC made - what was seen by most - as a U-turn when it initially suspended Gary Linekar over his Tweets about the government’s rhetoric around immigration, only to reinstate him less than a week later. (The BBC was at pains to describe this not as a “climb-down” but “proportionate action).
All four editorial issues have the issue of diversity and inclusion at their core. The first two being obviously racial issues, the third being about LGBTQ+ rights and the fourth, immigration, being a heavily racialised subject.
The biggest problem that the BBC has, when it comes to its editorial guidelines in general, and “due impartiality” in particular, is diversity.
It is the editorial issue literally hiding in plain sight.
This is about how a centralised organisation, which is meant to represent the whole of the UK, fairly represents the concerns and interests of, and about, minority groups while maintaining due impartiality. I saw this problem close up with regards to regional diversity when I was head of BBC Scotland Current Affairs in 2014 covering the Scottish Independence referendum. The fall out of which the BBC is still suffering from.
We do need to set up an independent review into BBC’s editorial guidelines and impartiality, but unless diversity is at the very centre of the review it will fail irrespective of who sits on it.
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