Balance and impartiality in Journalism

In this video, I want to talk about balance and impartiality. Firstly, why is this so important?  Think about it this way. trust is your currency.

The value of what you do is based around the fact that people trust you or your organisation. Just ask yourself, why does the audience come to you?
There is no shortage of information out there. If someone searches the internet or goes on social media, they will be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. What makes you or your news outlet any different? The answer is, the audience trusts the quality of the information you are giving them.

That is what gives a respected news organisation an advantage over the information given out by someone who has no credibility with the audience. Your viewers, readers, or listeners put a certain level of trust that you are giving them accurate, honest information, and insights. I can take a long time to build up trust, but you can lose it in seconds if you forget about balance and impartiality.

So when people see you as impartial what do they really mean? Well, it means you do not have a hidden agenda. When you approach a story you should be simply trying to find out what has happened. This involves looking at a breadth of views on the topic.  It’s all about intent. You’re not bringing your own feelings to the story. You go in, have a look at the different arguments and perspectives, and present those to your audience.

Imagine there was a construction project where workers were threatening to go on strike over poor working conditions. You cannot go into it presuming you know who is right, who is to blame, and why.  Even if you’ve had some bad past experiences with construction companies you cannot let it cloud your judgement. Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal in the US in the 1970s had a definition of reporting. He said it was trying to give people the best obtainable version of the truth. We don’t always get all the facts, but we strive to do the best we can to give people the truth, using all the arguments and angles.  It means we cannot have our own agenda where we are promoting one side of the argument or trying to change the narrative for personal or political reasons. Another factor with impartiality is having no perceived bias.

Does the audience feel you are coming at the story with preconceived ideas or bias? Are you seen to be too close to someone involved in the story? Always be vigilant to make sure you do not appear to be biased one way or the other.

Impartiality is not being completely neutral in that you come to no conclusions. You may have heard it said that if one side says it’s raining and the other side says it’s sunny….your job is not simply to report both arguments…your job is to look out of the window and check. You can come to judgments, but you must do so without bias or preconceptions…it must be based on weighing up the available evidence. This brings me on to balance. Impartiality is about considering a range of views and angles and being open-minded. Balance is about reporting a story in a way that each side gets a fair chance to put their point across. Let’s say there is a story about a new shopping centre development. Perhaps the local shop owners feel the new shopping mall will damage the local economy and ruin the area. The developers behind the project may argue it will boost the local economy.

Your job is to hear both arguments, but also to challenge them. If there are facts that back up one side or the other, you need to report those too. By being balanced you are being curious and open-minded, but also giving both sides a fair chance to be heard. There is though, one important concept to remember. If the vast majority of opinion and evidence supports one side of the argument you need to report that. Otherwise, you get false equivalence.

If one person thinks the world is going to end tomorrow, but most people disagree, you should not give both sides equal weight in the name of balance. Another principle to be aware of is the right to reply.  If the workers building the shopping mall say safety measures are inadequate, you need to give them the right to reply to such a serious allegation.  They may choose not to comment, but you need to give them the chance to reply so you can balance the story. So we’ve talked about covering a single story, but what about balance over a period of time?

Well firstly you should always be impartial, but when it comes to balance you need to think about your coverage as a whole. If there were two political parties, you might cover stories about what policies they support. It is important that you pay attention to how much coverage each is getting over a period of time. If one gets lots of coverage and the other gets almost none, then for the audience it will not seem balanced. Another thing that can affect balance is the voices that are heard.

When you have expert guests or interviewees, do you tend to hear the same people again and again? The danger of this is they get a disproportionate voice on the topic. Try and get a balance of views and voices.  If you work in video or photographs think about the visuals. If you use the same visuals over and over, this can create a warped impression.  If you constantly show the worst area of a particular city, people may think the whole city is all like that. Your visuals tell a story, so make sure they are balanced too.

Next, do your formats ensure balance? When you have politicians debating an issue, is your programme set up in such a way that everyone gets heard? Is anyone at a disadvantage? If they are, rethink the format of your programme. This leads on to the next question. Are you measuring balance in any way and how do you do that?  Firstly, in simple terms, you can assess how much time or space is given to one particular point of view. This is common around elections when we try and make sure we are giving the various political parties fair coverage. This can be done formally or informally. Another thing to look at is the range of interviewees or contributors.  Are you getting a big enough range of interviewees, and are they balanced between the main viewpoints? Next, is each side being challenged equally? You may interview two politicians, but if you give one a very challenging interview and the other is asked easy questions, you have not been impartial or balanced. The final thing you can consider is adding some questions to your audience surveys. This is all subjective, but it is worth finding out if your audience feels you are being balanced when covering major issues.

In today’s media, there are more programmes that are not impartial. They have a host who has strong opinions one way or the other. Some networks see this as more entertaining and engaging. That is a whole other debate, but one thing that helps the audience is signposting what is considered impartial news programming and what is not. In a newspaper, there is often an editorial section where writers give their opinions. If it is not clear what is supposed to be balanced and impartial, and what is an openly opinionated show, the audience may lose trust in your news output. Of course, you may get specialist correspondents who are journalists and may blog about a topic and give their perspective, but they should not be pushing a particular agenda. Never let your reader, viewer, or listener be confused as to whether or not a programme or publication is meant to be impartial..

So in closing, balance and impartiality are quite simple concepts, but they are also very important. Are you coming into a story with the right intentions? Are you hearing all the different views with an open mind and are you reporting that in a  balanced way that gives the various views a fair amount of coverage? We do not live in a perfect world, so it is not always simple, but as long as your intention is to give what you judge to be an accurate portrayal of what is happening, you should maintain the trust of your audience.