BBC 'IMPARTIALITY'

The BBC loves to portray itself as a bastion of fairness and impartiality. Once you've stopped rolling around on the floor and laughing, you may enjoy reading these excerpts from their extensive guidelines on impartiality, along with their translations from Beebspeak into English. The BBC clearly never reads them.

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Impartiality 'Guidelines'

Reality Bites

Impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC's commitment to its audiences.

This is why all our political coverage is impartially anti-Tory, anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-English.

The Agreement accompanying the BBC's Charter requires us to produce comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs.

And one day we will. Starting with that report showing Satan strapping on the ice-skates.

The BBC is forbidden from expressing an opinion on current affairs or matters of public policy.

But as our coverage is always 100% anti-Tory, anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-English , you know what we think anyway.

We strive to reflect a wide range of opinion.

Unless we don't like it, in which case, sod it.

We exercise our editorial freedom to produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so.

Editor's say-so is our best cop-out for propaganda and bias.

We can explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may require a right of reply.

You may win the National Lottery jackpot this weekend. Accrington Stanley may win the FA Cup.

We must ensure we avoid bias.

But apparently not bare-faced lying!

Our journalists and presenters may not express personal opinions on matters of controversy. Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters.

Such as crying over dead terrorists, sucking up to Labour ministers, or slagging off US Republican presidents, all of which we've admitted to but done nothing to rectify.

We must be convinced, that a clear public interest outweighs the possible offence.

'Public interest' - another good cop-out for bias and misrepresentation.

We should not automatically assume that academics and journalists from other organisations are impartial and make it clear to our audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint.

That is, make it clear on those occasions they're from the Right, and remember that the other 99.99% of the time, it's not Left-wingers, it's 'Socialists'.

Our reporting must remain accurate, impartial and fair even when our content, or the BBC itself, becomes the story.

This is why all BBC cock-ups are either 1) never reported, and the original article changed whilst faking the old time-stamp or 2) mentioned briefly on the website on a broken link that's removed after half an hour, and never apologized for .

When covering controversial subjects dealing with matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy we should retain a respect for factual accuracy.

The key word is should. As in government ministers should always tell the truth.

It is not normally appropriate for BBC staff or for regular BBC presenters or reporters associated with news or public policy related programmes to present personal view programmes on controversial subjects.

Except when they're on things the BBC supports, in which case that's okay.





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