“BBC Business Coverage: Innocent of Bias 2.0!”

Child’s play: The Beeb used to model the English language; now it merely tortures it.

Measures should be taken to strengthen the monitoring of impartiality issues in business and to ensure there is compliance with the BBC’s high standards. In particular, measures should be introduced to address lapses which occur when covering commercial issues. Presenters should be regularly reminded of their obligation to be impartial. – The Budd Commission on BBC Business Journalism (PDF)

The Observatório da Imprensa (Brazil) reports that “the BBC has been found innocent of partiality in its coverage of financial affairs” by the Budd panel commissioned by the BBC Trust.

I did a double take when I read that.

Are the Observatório and I reading the same document?

The report that the Observatório cites as its source, by Tara Conlan of the U.K. Guardian, was supposedly dated May 25, 2007.

Another report by the same reporter, however, filed May 26, 2007, was headlined as follows:

• BBC business news failing impartiality test, says report

Black is white. War is peace. Death is life. Monkeys fly out of my butt.

See also

• “BBC shows another side to the world”
• The Sycophantic BBC: Budd on FUD
• BBC 2.0: False Dilemma as a Way of Second Life
• BBC 2.0 Borked on Business-Friendliness

In a May 25 press release, the Trust concluded:

The panel, chaired by Sir Alan Budd, does not believe the BBC has a systematic bias against business. Its overall conclusion is that most of the BBC’s business output meets the required standards of impartiality”. But the panel also says it has seen a number of individual lapses and identified some trends which lead to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards.

It is not “systematically biased,” according to this press release.

And yet its coverage displays “trends that led to repeated breaches of BBC standards”?

The commission concluded that it should “strengthen the monitoring of impartiality issues,” start “addressing lapses,” and “regular remind” presenters of “their obligation to be impartial.”

It sounds as the commission has concluded that controls on impartiality repeatedly failed and should be systematically applied.

The distinction is lost on me, but diffusing the issue of responsibility somewhere between journalistic practice and editorial oversight does remind me a lot of Byron Calame’s response to the problem of freelancer conflicts of interest at the New York Times.

See “The Sweet Teat of Junket Whoredom”: The Public Editor on “Fighting Toadies.”

BBC content managers, meanwhile, are constantly seen at Journalism 2.0 conferences preaching the gospel of “beyond impartiality” and “the new impartiality” and “radical impartiality.”

• BBC: Radical Impartiality and its Discontents
• BBS: The Beeb 2.0 Touts Enciclomedia
• Impartiality 2.0

The Observatório seems to be rewriting the BBC Trust’s own press release, which itself seems to be interpreting the Budd report rather, um, creatively.

The whole affair strikes me as an exercise in crude Humpty Dumptyism.

A BBC foi inocentada, em um relatório independente feito para o BBC Trust, “de parcialidade na cobertura de assuntos financeiros”. Sua cobertura foi criticada, entretanto, por lapsos individuais e “repetidas quebras de padrões”, como editores demonstrando não entender direito o funcionamento do mercado e apresentadores expressando suas opiniões sobre produtos.

The BBC was found innocent, in an independent report [commissioned] by the BBC trust, “of partiality in the coverage of financial affairs.”

The press release does not use the term “found innocent.”

Its coverage was criticized, however, for individual lapses and “repeated breaches of standards,” such as editors demonstrating that they do not correctly understand the functioning of the market and presenters expressing their opinions about products.

The problem described was decidedly not that presenters were “expressing their opinions about products”

The problem — download and read the report yourself, I have mirrored it, above — was that they “presented the appearance of uncritically endorsing products.”

It is one thing to review a product critically (but fairly, one hopes; I always point to the film critic Roger Ebert as a model in this regard, myself) and quite another to be appearing to shill for it.

I bet you I visit the Web site, and find a debatable example within about 20 seconds.

Just the other day, on BBC News (Channel 104 on Brooklyn Cablevision), I saw a profile on the reunion tour of 1980s power trio The Police found presenters waxing nostalgic about the first time they heard the song “I’ll Be Watching You.”

Which is a catchy little number, sure — about the first 1,000 times you heard it played in heavy rotation on every station on the spectrum for months and months and months on end, and used in soap opera after soap opera and commercial after commercial — but they should have come to me and asked for a skeptical view about why anyone should care.

I promise to be nice: I actually have a soft spot in my heart for Sting and Andy Summers myself. Much as I may hate to admit it.

Okay, anyway, so how about “Big Brother Will Have An Edition Set in Second Life”? With a link to the Web sites of Second Life’s creator, the producer of Big Brother, and the game manufacturer Electronic Arts?

Is Second Life really the only product of its kind on the market?

A Brazilian blogger recently pointed to an alternative, for example, though I have not really cared enough about the subject to check it out: Tupi Takes His Own Second Life!

Is there note more than one “parallel universe” on the market? And if so, why does Reuters not have a virtual news bureau there as well? Why does Reuters Brasil not have an Orkut news agency, for example? A lot of strange and interesting things go on there, even if the laws of gravity and the inevitability of death are not suspended in the virtual community.

And why do Reuters and the BBC express enthusiasm for FaceBook but not, say, Tribe.net (if that social networking site is still going. My enthusiasm for such things has waned) or LinkedIn?

See “Don’t Buck the Trend”: Hearing Global Voices at the World Editors Forum.

And see also this from the Associated Press’s Michael Astor today: The Girl From São Paulo is CeU.

Maybe it’s time for The Girl from Ipanema to step aside and make way for the girl from Sao Paulo. She goes by the name of CeU, which means both sky and heaven in Portuguese, though lately American listeners have been tilting toward the latter translation, lapping up her heavenly new CD at Starbucks, where her sound goes down as smooth as Brazilian coffee.

First of all, people from São Paulo tend to like their coffee as strong as industrial strength paint thinner. Possibly only the Turks are accustomed to more bitter, hyperactivity-inducing sludge than your standard bimbo de mama.

And secondly, I happen to really, really like Ceu — as well and other singers of in that sort of nova bossa nova, neo-traditionalist vein.

I would be happy, in fact, for the right money and the right contract, to write ad copy to promote her albums and Starbuck’s cross-marketing program, which seems to expose its customers to an interesting and rich alternative cultural curriculum.

But on the newswire?

The Observatório write-up lacks a byline, but attributes the facts contained therein, as I said, to Tara Conlan of the U.K. Guardian in article it says she wrote on May 25, 2007, but which it does not link to or provide a standard citation of. 

In that report, the emphasis falls more on the negative comments on general trends, with examples of excellence cited as exceptions:

However, individual business reports on Radio 4’s The World at One and File on Four, and Five Live’s Weekend Business were commended as “outstanding pieces in terms of fairness, accuracy, context and balance”.

I have no complaints about most of BBC’s business coverage that I see, either, by the way. It is, I suppose you could argue, a matter of emphasis, but it verges on logic-chopping.

“O relatório inclui evidências de jornalismo de boa qualidade e estamos felizes que não tenha sido encontrada tendência de comportamento sistemático contrário ao mercado”, afirmou Sir Michael Lyons, presidente do BBC Trust, conselho que representa os contribuintes que financiam a rede pública britânica.

“The report includes examples of good journalism and we are happy not to have found a systematic tendency of behavior contrary to the market,” said Sir Michael Lyons, president of the BBC Trust, the council that represents the taxpayers who finance the British public broadcasting network.

Examples of good journalism despite negative trends requiring systematic remedies, this is how I am seeing the report. You?

The network now has a hybrid revenue model, as we all know full well — partly taxpayer-funded (domestic), partly for-profit (international).

I am not sure what “contrary to the market” (or whatever he actually said — I am retranslating back into English here, which is an absurd thing to do) means.

Perhaps he is applying the stronger standard whereby the BBC might be relieved to have been found to have been pumping up its business partners while dumping on their competition.

As in trying to influence the positive newsflow of, oh, say, Microsoft with that “sycophantic” — the Budd commission’s word, used three times — interview of Bill Gates.

On Lyons, see also Lyons Vows Impartiality (Tara Conlan, Guardian, April 5, 2007):

New BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons has insisted he is not close to chancellor Gordon Brown and promised “independence and impartiality”. … Admitting that he is more of a radio man than a keen television viewer, Sir Michael batted away suggestions that his appointment was the result of political connections.

Was there not some talk in Tory circles about how all the knighthoods were going to big campaign contributors? What became of that flap, by the way?

As John Pilger likes to say, “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”

We all understand what is at stake here, do we not? A simple metaphor from the realm of “soccer politics” suffices to explain it: Are we business journalists players, referees, fans, or play-by-play announcers?

All four roles are perfectly legitimate, of course, but one should not play more than one role at the same time.

When the BBC 2.0 partners with Microsoft, and is found to have conducted with an “obsequious” interview with Bill Gates, and touts Microsoft philanthropic projects without hearing the other side, and Microsoft has the public relations practices that it has, well, what are we supposed to think?

See also “Google accused of conducting smear campaign against Privacy International”

When the men in the referee’s jersey start working to favor one side over the other, the public gets outraged and the jogo bonito gets spoiled.

In Brazil, in fact, a fan sued successfully for a refund of what he paid for box seats over Botafogo matches (I think it was) that were later shown to have been thrown by a crooked referee. Fascinating case, that.

And while it may be legitimate for the “color” announcer man to express some sympathy for the home team when broadcasting to the home market — groaning when Zaidane scores and letting out a big goooooooooooooooooooooool! when Ronaldinho does, in our case — it simply will not do for the play by play man to simply refuse to report the fact that Zaidane has scored, or that French team has taken the field at all.

Much as we Brazil fans — they got shut out by Mexico the other day, ye gods — might wish they had not.