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Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm
This article reconsiders the concepts of balance and impartiality in journalism, in the context of a quantitative content analysis of sourcing patterns in BBC news programming on radio, television and online in 2007 and 2012. Impartiality is the cornerstone of principles of public service broadcasti...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5732589/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29278243 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648094 |
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author | Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin Berry, Mike Garcia-Blanco, Iñaki Bennett, Lucy Cable, Jonathan |
author_facet | Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin Berry, Mike Garcia-Blanco, Iñaki Bennett, Lucy Cable, Jonathan |
author_sort | Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin |
collection | PubMed |
description | This article reconsiders the concepts of balance and impartiality in journalism, in the context of a quantitative content analysis of sourcing patterns in BBC news programming on radio, television and online in 2007 and 2012. Impartiality is the cornerstone of principles of public service broadcasting at the BBC and other broadcasters modelled on it. However, the article suggests that in the case of the BBC, it is principally put into practice through juxtaposing the positions of the two main political parties – Conservative and Labour. On this basis, the article develops the idea of the ‘paradigm of impartiality-as-balance.’ This paradigm prevails despite the news organisation’s commitment to representing a broader range of opinion. The paradigm of impartiality-as-balance means that only a narrow range of views and voices are heard on the most contentious and important issues. Further, it results in reporting that focuses on party-political conflict, to the detriment of a journalism which provides much-needed context. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5732589 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57325892017-12-22 Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin Berry, Mike Garcia-Blanco, Iñaki Bennett, Lucy Cable, Jonathan Journalism Articles This article reconsiders the concepts of balance and impartiality in journalism, in the context of a quantitative content analysis of sourcing patterns in BBC news programming on radio, television and online in 2007 and 2012. Impartiality is the cornerstone of principles of public service broadcasting at the BBC and other broadcasters modelled on it. However, the article suggests that in the case of the BBC, it is principally put into practice through juxtaposing the positions of the two main political parties – Conservative and Labour. On this basis, the article develops the idea of the ‘paradigm of impartiality-as-balance.’ This paradigm prevails despite the news organisation’s commitment to representing a broader range of opinion. The paradigm of impartiality-as-balance means that only a narrow range of views and voices are heard on the most contentious and important issues. Further, it results in reporting that focuses on party-political conflict, to the detriment of a journalism which provides much-needed context. SAGE Publications 2016-06-30 2017-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5732589/ /pubmed/29278243 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648094 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Articles Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin Berry, Mike Garcia-Blanco, Iñaki Bennett, Lucy Cable, Jonathan Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title | Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title_full | Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title_fullStr | Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title_full_unstemmed | Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title_short | Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
title_sort | rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? how the bbc attempted and failed to change the paradigm |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5732589/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29278243 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648094 |
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