Will product placement affect impartiality?

Traditionally, the UK has resisted product placement in TV programming. By allowing shameless plugging during broadcasting, the quality & integrity of programming would be brought down to a horrendous low. Then in comes the government, with pushes to repeal placement guidelines and allow advertising within programming.

Now, the government’s new plans to allow product placement are being cut back again. Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, was proposing a free market on advertising (minus tobacco ads…), but following concerns from Andy Burnham & Hillary Benn, constrains are being put on ads to help fight the ‘obesity crisis’. The concept of parents actually learning to look after their children properly & not allowing them to balloon into wobbling beasts hasn’t been looked at though…

So, coming back to impartiality….who will check why the particular products are being placed? Does this open up a whole new area of potential corruption? Who is to stop a producer with shares in one company pushing for the placement of that product? How is this regulated, and how does it keep programming balanced where there is so much commercial interest and potential profit?

The 12 guiding principles in the BBC impartiality report

The BBC report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel contains 12 guiding principles to inform the corporation’s approach to impartiality in the face of rapid technological and social change.

Published together with extensive research on audience expectations and perceptions of impartiality, the report is the result of a project first commissioned by the BBC board of governors in conjunction with BBC management in November 2005.

It aims to identify the challenges and risks to impartiality and has been fully endorsed by the BBC Trust, the BBC executive board and the BBC journalism board.

The 12 guiding principles are complementary to the BBC’s editorial guidelines on impartiality and do not replace them.

1. Impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC as the leading provider of information and entertainment in the United Kingdom, and as a pre-eminent broadcaster internationally. It is a legal requirement, but it should also be a source of pride.

2. Impartiality is an essential part of the BBC’s contract with its audience, which owns and funds the BBC. Because of that, the audience itself will often be a factor in determining impartiality.

3. Impartiality must continue to be applied to matters of party political or industrial controversy. But in today’s more diverse political, social and cultural landscape, it requires a wider and deeper application.

4. Impartiality involves breadth of view, and can be breached by omission. It is not necessarily to be found on the centre ground.

5. Impartiality is no excuse for insipid programming. It allows room for fair-minded, evidence-based judgments by senior journalists and documentary makers, and for controversial, passionate and polemical arguments by contributors and writers.

6. Impartiality applies across all BBC platforms and all types of programme. No genre is exempt. But the way it is applied and assessed will vary in different genres.

7. Impartiality is most obviously at risk in areas of sharp public controversy. But there is a less visible risk, demanding particular vigilance, when programmes purport to reflect a consensus for “the common good”, or become involved with campaigns.

8. Impartiality is often not easy. There is no template of wisdom which will eliminate fierce internal debate over difficult dilemmas. But the BBC’s journalistic expertise is an invaluable resource for all departments to draw on.

9. Impartiality can often be affected by the stance and experience of programme makers, who need constantly to examine and challenge their own assumptions.

10. Impartiality requires the BBC to examine its own institutional values, and to assess the effect they have on its audiences.

11. Impartiality is a process, about which the BBC should be honest and transparent with its audience: this should permit greater boldness in its programming decisions. But impartiality can never be fully achieved to everyone’s satisfaction: the BBC should not be defensive about this but ready to acknowledge and correct significant breaches as and when they occur.

12. Impartiality is required of everyone involved in output. It applies as much to the most junior researcher as it does to the director general. But editors and executive producers must give a strong lead to their teams. They must ensure that the impartiality process begins at the conception of a programme and lasts throughout production: if left until the approval stage, it is usually too late.

Taken from Media Guardian.  A little old, but still applicable.

Do ethical decisions enforce bias?

This blog is a scenario that I would like you to read. You are the editor of a massive media outlet. The footage you receive through the wires comes to your desk at 13:00 local time. This war is your top story and of massive public interest – you need a report for the 18:00 national news.

THE SCENE: The bullets fly over my head, the wailing screams of death ring around me. I find myself walking into a darkened alleyway, just off the main square. It’s littered with debris from the buildings around me. The light slowly dims as the walls tower around me, leaving me plagued with fears of apprehension. I’m drawn towards a figure at the end of the alleyway and follow my feet towards them with my cameraman. As I get closer, the figure slowly changes to the more familiar shape of a person. I can’t quite tell what, or who she is.

I get closer. It’s a woman, no older than 30. I can’t see her face, she is clutching something. As I go closer I can see that she is holding something. Something she doesn’t want to give up. It’s a small child. The child is lifeless, laying in a pool of blood, which is spilling down the slope of the alleyways dusty surface. The woman, who I presume is the child’s mother, seems very distraught. She clutches the child close to her breast, with her arms tightly wrapped around the lifeless torso. The young girl is dead – her blood stained clothes have seeped through into her mothers. The bottom half of the young girls body has disappeared. I look further down the alleyway and her legs lay lifeless on the ground – a stones-throw away from her remaining body. Her face is unrecognisable, shrapnel has disfigured the once gentle and innocent features, and her body is badly burnt. She was fired upon by a rocket propelled grenade and it has taken her life in a pitiful way. The mother sobs into the daughters hair, and she lets out an unbearable sound of emotion – a piercing scream – as she realises her child is gone.

What do you do?

1. Edit the footage making sure you do not include any scenes that some viewers may find disturbing
2. Use small amount of footage that is ‘tasteful’, and get a live interview link with the reporter from the war-ravaged city
3. Show the footage in its entirety saying this report has graphic images
4. Wait until the 22:00 news to show the footage after the watershed
5. Do not show any footage
6. Other

I refrain from claiming that any of these options are right, but these are just some of the questions many journalists, editors and news programmers will face. It’s a tough job for journalists to remain impartial. But not hiding anything from the viewer is the sole responsibility of the journalist and journalism as a profession. We are the observers, the reporters. If we are not allowed to report what we see going on in front of our very own eyes then journalism will die a slow death.