Impartial journalism: so last decade?

Late last year, Lewis Goodall, Sky News's political correspondent, made a significant career move by signing to go (back) to the BBC as policy editor for its flagship current affairs output, Newsnight. For the political aristocracy, Newsnight remains the party everyone longs to be invited to; or, perhaps, the salon of the ageing but still respected duchess. Others may be more exciting, may have younger, cooler guests, but none has quite the respectability and the cachet of the BBC. Goodall, like Faisal Islam before him, has confirmed this with his move from Sky.

To an extent, this is just so much scribblers' scuttlebutt. The appointments section of inward-looking media publications are pored over in intimate detail but only by a small group. I'm guilty of it myself. I get a weekly email with a summary of who's going where and I take the time to go through the names and publications, making off-the-cuff, almost subconscious value judgements of whether it's a move upwards, downwards or sideways, whether the person in question is now of more or less interest to me, and, with senior moves, if anything else can be read into it. Does it indicate a shift of focus by the broadcaster or publication? A change in tack, or in style? A little like Talleyrand wondered when he heard of Bonaparte's death, "Whatever did he mean by that?"

The more I've thought about it, though, the more I think there is a story here. Lewis Goodall is a respected and able commentator, and when he said last year that he would leave Sky "with a heavy heart", I dare say there were colleagues at the channel who felt the same way. He has an authorial string to his bow, as the writer of "Left for Dead? The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party", a 2018 volume which charted the history of Labour from Blair to Corbyn. (Andrew Adonis, with unusual levity and wit, described it as "the best work I have read of his generation, which thank God is replacing mine.") He is also, for those who like this sort of trivia, a graduate of St John's College, Oxford, alma mater of one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, formerly of this parish.

Lewis is a prolific tweeter. And - I'm sure he would not dissent from this - a bit of a politics geek. He likes, and knows, the statistics, the history, the ins and outs of UK public life, and can apply them to the news for perspective and context. He was a frequent user of social media during the general election campaign and then, indefatigably, during election night and morning. Inevitably, as the author of a book on the Labour Party, he tended to tweet more about the significance of Labour losses and what they were going to mean for the national picture, and for the future of the party. Some felt that his tweets had, perhaps, a rather wistful, elegiac quality, as if he was in mourning for the destruction of the party of Blair, with which he had grown up. His home seat of Birmingham Northfield was won by a Conservative candidate for the first time since the election of 1987. I've been looking back at some of his output, an eye open for a sense of "Never glad, confident morning again."

Because that is now the accusation. Right-wing commentators and now government ministers have declared that Lewis is firmly, and unacceptably, left-wing in his opinions, a "Labour Party activist", according to some (this is denied by many others). Now, we hear that Newsnight is to join Today on the Government's index of prohibited interviews: what is the point, ministers and advisers ask, of exposing their best and brightest to scrutiny in a forum which is editorially parti pris? They won't get a fair hearing, they will be railroaded and grandstanded, and they will be forced into uttering unhelpful soundbites. We hear at the same time that the BBC is considering curtailing its employees' use of social media. Laura Kuenssberg (of whom I am a great fan) is now a hate figure for the hard left as, they imagine, a mouthpiece for the Government, irretrievably biased against Jeremy Corbyn, socialism, the Labour Party and any manifestation of leftery you care to imagine.

This is a bad matter. To have two of the most respected and insightful current affairs programmes in the UK, Today and Newsnight, boycotted absolutely by the Government in office, helps no-one in the long term. Ministers may avoid a bad morning, opposition politicians may get a bit more of the limelight, but ultimately scrutiny and analysis and public awareness of the political sphere all suffer. We all become more poorly informed, more easily forced back on our existing prejudices, less willing to challenge ourselves; and politicians become lazy and out-of-shape by sticking to softball appearances on This Morning or other less rigorous forums of cross-examination. And it reinforces the narrative that politicians lie, or at least don't tell the truth. If a minister only has to survive a warm rubdown and a plumping of the sofa cushions, he or she will never reveal uncomfortable facts. These truths will remain hidden; and when they do emerge, people will, not unreasonably, cry, But you never told us that! Well, no, they might respond truthfully. No-one asked.

Even this is not the end of the story. A motif which the Conservatives developed during last month's election campaign was that, as a radical, reforming government, they would look again at the licence fee and the funding arrangements of the BBC. This, in isolation, is no bad thing. The BBC will celebrate its centenary in 2022, and it is a rather old-fashioned organisation. Parts of its ethos could barely tell you who John Reith was; other elements still have a fond attachment to his belief in the value of "all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement". (Viewers of Mrs Brown's Boys may wish to look away now.) So a review of the BBC is not inherently a bad thing, if properly considered and throughly researched.

If, however, this review is conducted under the aegis of a government which is not only predisposed towards radicalism (see Cummings, Dominic) but also harbours suspicions that the BBC's news output is shot through with left-wing opinion, it becomes a very different matter. A review becomes a potential hatchet job, a trimming of wings and a settling of scores. Does a dedicated free-market government even believe in a state-funded broadcaster anyway? Is that not a rather paternalistic and monopolising, anti-competitive concept? The gentleman in Whitehall (or the non-binary media graduate in Salford MediaCity*) knows best? In the public sector, butchery can often wear the cloak of reformation, and can even, for a while, enjoy the enthusiastic applause of some of the people. Eventually, though, even if only generations later, the cloak will fall.

So I come to the question I posed at the beginning. Is an impartial broadcasting entity, whether or non state-funded, desirable or even achievable in the 2020s? Perhaps the media landscape - 57 channels and nothing on, red button, catch-up, Twitter and Instagram, vlogging, influencers and fake news - has simply moved on. Maybe it is now impossible to sustain impartiality, at least through human journalists, who are bound to have views, opinions, emotions. If the medium becomes the story, if every tic and word a correspondent utters is examined and parsed for bias, it's possible we have lost the point, and that we should move on.

I don't know what the answer is. I grew up in the 1980s, with (initially) three television channels (I can remember the excitement of Channel 4 being launched by the glamorous appearance of, er, Richard Whiteley hosting Countdown). So the media landscape with makes sense to me on an instinctive level is a trusted BBC and ITN, Channel 4 perhaps taking a quirkier and more wearingly progressive stance, then venerable broadsheet newspaper in black and white (yes, kids and colleagues: colour photography in newspapers is a very recent innovation). I have grown to master social media to an extent, but, like languages, adults never learn them as fluently as those who grow up surrounded by them.

So perhaps a younger person would be more open to radicalism. Ditch the licence fee - it's a propaganda tax, and anyway, who are these people to tell us what to think? We look for the news in our own way, in a format and on a platform that suits us. Current affairs built around our lives, not the other way round. At least, as someone tweeted today, broadcasters like talkRADIO make no secret of their leanings, their bias, their prejudices. You don't listen to Julia Hartley-Brewer to hear about the virtues of the EU or how the Leave campaign cheated in the referendum, any more than you read Owen Jones for a dispassionate consideration of Conservative policies on healthcare provision. Maybe this openness is the way forward. You want Fox News, you get Fox News. I'd be interested to know what other people think...