Nuetrality Is Cowardice

[from New Statesman — Neutrality is cowardice by Mark Lynas]

Future historians, assuming that there are any, will have an entertaining time looking back at how today’s journalists wriggled when confronted with the great moral question of our age. Faced with clear evidence of an existential threat to the survival of the planetary biosphere, news correspondents and media organisations not only constantly fail to convey the true magnitude of the story, but also dash for cover every time the going gets tough.

The most sacred principle of news reporting is that of “balance”: giving equal weight to both sides of an argument. I say this principle is sacred because it is so little adhered to. Analyse most news journalism and you will quickly discover a welter of unspoken assumptions and hidden biases, from the false parity accorded to the combatants in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the refusal to question the “need” for economic growth. The reality, as most journalists will tell you after a couple of drinks, is that “fairness” largely consists of balancing out and accommodating the most powerful lobbies and the loudest voices. In an issue as divisive and politicised as climate change, that for a long time meant according the tiny number of sceptics equal coverage with representatives of the majority scientific consensus, leaving the public woefully misinformed. Now it simply means being timid: the reactionary lobby is still powerful enough to shoot down anyone who sticks their head above the parapet and says anything that might vaguely be interpreted as “campaigning”.

The BBC is the proximate cause of Mark’s anger, since its senior management has deemed that weighing systematically against global warming lacks impartiality:

“It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet,” insisted Newsnight editor Peter Barron. “I think there are a lot of people who think that it must be stopped.”

If Barron is really suggesting that the BBC should be “neutral” on the question of planetary survival, his absurd stance surely sets a new low for political cowardice in the media. It is also completely inconsistent. On easy moral questions, such as poverty in Africa, the BBC is quite happy to campaign explicitly (as with Comic Relief or Live Aid), despite the claim by the corporation’s head of television news, Peter Horrocks, that its role is “giving people information, not leading them or prophesying”.

Jeff Jarvis suggests that this is moral relativism, where it is deemed good policy for the BBC to push for easy moral choices — like starving children in Africa — but where pushing for something potentially at odds with powerful lobbies or constituencies is considered to lack impartiality:

[from Objectivity/impartiality = cowardice, boredom, obsolescence by Jeff Jarvis]

Acting as if there were no agenda in journalism is itself a deception. Why does an editor decide to pursue and publicize a story about, say, public corruption? Because he thinks corruption is bad — otherwise, it wouldn’t be a story — and he wants to do something about it. He has an agenda. Of course, he has. To act as if he doesn’t is a lie of omission.

I believe that Jarvis is right when he argues that journalists find safe haven from uncomfortable ethics in their simplistic notions of balance in the name of objectivity or impartialiality. It is far too easy to find a proponent for green and then to ‘balance’ with some misanthrope who lies about global warming for fees from oil companies, and then to cast it as a fair and balanced story. The world is more complex, or perhaps better said, the world is more subjective and personal than that. This our biosphere they are joking with, our only biosphere. It is an sin of omission to objectify the thin, green crust of life on Earth, or maybe the truest sacrilege.

If the old media can’t see that this is a time when their hand waving about objectivity — which was always a cop out, was always at best a white lie — cannot go on, then they will rapidly crash to the bottom of public trust. While there may be a minority of holdouts on global warming, it is as stark a moral issue today as slavery was in the 18th century, as Mark Lynnas points out.

If the BBC and others don’t believe that need to work to counter global warming, they are nuts, and we have no reason to trust their system if it can’t muster a clear, strong, and single voice to shout, “Enough!”