John Bridcut wrote a wonderfully pompous "impartiality" report for the BBC Governors in 2007. Seminars were held to help the conclusions, debating important hypotheticals such as "Sacha Baron Cohen is Paul Merton’s guest in Room 101, and says that, among the things he wants to get rid of are: kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bible. Is this a problem?" The result included 12 Hopelessly Unmemorable Guiding Principles, and an assertion that it's possible to have more than two different opinions on the same subject. (I apologise for the length of the extract below, but it's important to give you a flavour of the impartiality industry and how it works.)
Impartiality today requires a greater subtlety in covering and counterpointing the varied shades of opinion – and arguably always should have done. Whereas opinion used to be balanced in simple alternatives – and could be measured in tilts of the seesaw or swings of the pendulum – nowadays a more appropriate metaphor might be the many spokes of the wagon wheel, particularly the three-dimensional television graphic developed for cricket coverage to illustrate the trajectories (both plan and elevation) of balls hit by batsmen. The wheel is not exactly circular, it has a shifting centre, the ‘spokes’ are not necessarily evenly spaced, nor do they all reach the edge of the wheel, nor does one ‘spoke’ necessarily point in a directly opposite direction to another. So opinion is not confined to ‘left’ and ‘right’ but ranges through 360 degrees. One opinion is not necessarily the exact opposite of another, nor do they all reach the extremity of available argument.
So now in 2012, Stuart Prebble has been asked by the Trust to measure the impact of this searing insight on the modern BBC. Good luck, chum.
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