Before you continue reading this column, I have a confession to make. I am biased. I have opinions - quite strong ones at times - on events of the day. On many issues, I have conservative views. On some, I have somewhat liberal ones. The only thing that connects them is my general point of view, which is the product of my own idiosyncratic thinking, reading and arguing. Or to put it another way: I have no intention of trying to persuade you of something in which I don't believe. And a large part of my motive in writing at all is to promote my own view of the world, however implausible to some, at the expense of others.

Got that? I have a feeling you do. This is a newspaper, after all. And columns in a newspaper invariably have a point of view. And in each individual newspaper, you won't necessarily get a full range of all the possible ideas and arguments out there. No one thinks this paper is interchangeable with the Observer, for example. And no one thinks that's particularly outrageous.

So why, one wonders, do we think so differently about television? Two weeks ago, the Independent Television Commission reprimanded the American-based cable channel, CNBC, for running an opinion and news program that featured only the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. The program was deemed too biased and is currently barred from being broadcast in Britain. It seems that while British readers are considered mature enough to distinguish between news and commentary, British viewers are not. Simple questions: aren't they often the same people? And what is unique about television that it requires some elusive quality called "objectivity"? I can see the argument, perhaps, in the 1940s, when there was only the BBC, and its power was so great and its reach so comprehensive that some kind of rigid internal balance was deemed important. (Even in the 1940s, of course, the BBC was anything but unbiased. It represented establishment Britain in largely conservative form.) But today? With dozens of television options to choose from, why on earth is "objectivity" deemed to be important to each? Are the viewers of television so radically different from newspaper readers? Why are they not allowed to pick and choose between differing viewpoints? And why are producers, editors and writers required to be "balanced" in their output?

Perhaps a look at the United States confirms for some what a hellish place the world would be with actual freedom to produce media that producers enjoy and viewers want. In the U.S., dozens of channels compete with each other and with subsidized public television and radio. Some radio stations - are you sitting down? - actually promote a liberal or a conservative view of the world. One of the newest and most successful cable news channels, Fox News, actually touts itself as an antidote to the liberalism endemic to much of the rest of television. Other stations - National Public Radio is the most obvious - are proud of their liberal tradition, and make only superficial attempts to disguise it. The long-standing anchor for CBS News, Dan Rather, has actually hosted fundraisers for the Democrats and makes no bones about his liberal opinions. ABC News' anchor, Peter Jennings, is an avowed critic of Israel's policies in the West Bank. And the moderator for ABC News' Sunday morning talk show, "This Week," is George Stephanopoulos, one of Bill Clinton's chief and early enablers. One of Public Television's major stars, Bill Moyers, makes no attempt to disguise his left-liberalism. Only last week, he predicted that Bush's victory in the mid-term elections would lead to a country run by religious right fanatics. Or look at "The West Wing." Does anyone in their right mind think that's written by anyone but a liberal Democrat? One tell-tale sign: in a week in which George W. Bush scored an historic electoral victory, the West Wing's Democratic hero won in a landslide.

Does this debase the American body politic? I don't think so. Bias is inevitable in any grown-up journalist's work. You can try to be balanced (and you're a better journalist if you try) - but even in your choice of topics, selection of guests, presentation of facts, you inevitably show your hand. And a grown-up journalist admits this. Then we can all get on with the task of assessing, discussing, and debating the issues involved. This isn't to say journalism should degenerate into simple propaganda or outright advocacy, at least not in the presentation of news rather than opinion. Trying to present many sides of an issue is a mark of an honest journalist or reporter. And maintaining a distinction between news and opinion is also the mark of an honest editor. But such honesty also requires that we don't pompously claim an absence of any bias, or arrogate to ourselves the mantle of complete impartiality, when such pristine neutrality is simply impossible. And that's the problem with the BBC and the regulation of television in modern Britain. In fact, the only time when things can go truly awry is when biased journalists pretend that they're completely objective. When viewers actually imbibe the biased news as if it were neutral, that's when the danger begins. The viewer's guard is down; the programme presents itself as authoritative; and sheer propaganda can get passed off as journalism. The threat, then, is not bias. The threat is the notion that bias can be abolished. That's when deception - a far more worrisome issue than bias - begins.

The classic American examples are National Public Radio and the New York Times. Virtually no Republicans work in either organization. The news stories reflect, in the case of NPR, a benevolent, well-meaning but thoroughly liberal view of the world. In the case of the New York Times, the news stories do exactly what they do in the Guardian: they are designed, edited and written to promote a political agenda. That's not to say they aren't often informative or interesting or excellent. They can be all of these. But for the most part, the bias is so obvious it scarcely requires pointing out (although there is now a gleeful cottage industry set up to expose the Times' absurd pretenses to objectivity).

The classic British example, in contrast, is the BBC. I grew up on Radio Four, and took it as gospel. It's only later in life when you look around you and see who actually went into the BBC as a career that you realize how skewed it is. Literally no one I knew in my generation who had anything good to say about Margaret Thatcher went into the BBC. No one. Why would be shocked to find that, two decades later, news coverage reflects this view of the world? Take the recent BBC miniseries on New Labour, called "The Project." Tory papers have pounced on it as proof of New Labour's iniquity. But in fact, its entire story-line is straight out of the Left's playbook. The equation of political realism with corruption, the assumption that pouring more money into unreformed public services is obviously a good thing, the critical importance of the Freedom of Information Act - whatever else these are, they certainly aren't part of Middle England's view of the world. It's Balliolism at public expense. Yet these assertions are presented as drama - as subtle a form of propaganda as you can find. And there's a long tradition of this - from Granada television in the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary products of leftwing extremists like John Pilger. (Another simple question: Pilger's polemics are unbiased in ways that a Wall Street Journal discussion isn't?)

Watching the BBC when I visit Britain is an eye-opening experience. The soft anti-Americanism, the unreflective Third-Worldism, the facile assumption that old-style statist policies on the environment are correct, the instinctual loathing of Israel, the benevolent multiculturalism, the equation of the E.U. with the future: all reflect an effortless left-liberal viewpoint. The BBC World News channel in America reflects the same bias. Last week, for example, I watched a BBC broadcast which depicted the Iraqi parliament as if it were an actual parliament, with elected officials and some role independent of the dictatorship it serves. No context was provided at all. And the sole commentator on this piece of news was James Zogby, the head of the Arab American Institute. From what I have seen in Britain, this is par for the course. And I see nothing wrong with this as such. There's a place for a left-leaning network for Britain. What's wrong is the pretense that the BBC is somehow neutral or objective or balanced. And, of course, what makes this doubly wrong is that it is paid for by the license fee. I can see why someone in a free society should tolerate a television channel that promotes a viewpoint with which she disagrees. I don't see why she should also be forced to pay for it, and then denied the opportunity to have an alternative by specious regulations demanding something ludicrously called "balance".

When experts ask themselves why audiences for television news have declined in the last decade, they might think about that point. For years, American television executives also asked themselves why their ratings were in constant decline. Of course, as liberals, they couldn't actually see their own bias, and so they looked elsewhere for reasons. And when the Fox News channel came along and won massive ratings almost from its debut, they still refused to recognize what had gone wrong. Belatedly, CNN has tried to recruit some less left-leaning commentators, reporters and anchors. But without the prospect of real competition, they wouldn't have changed at all. Neither will the BBC. They're like the Vatican.

So the notion that some television channels should actually have a viewpoint, recommended recently by Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas of Cardiff University, is not so absurd. This is especially true when it comes to political coverage, where opinions are always going to be divided. One of the glories of British culture is its scrappy and competitive press, which gives a variety of viewpoints in ways that America's monopolistic and pious newspapers don't. Why not convey some of this talent into television and radio? Such competition doesn't mean a lowering of standards, but clearer and fairer criteria with which to judge media products. Excessively slanted shows will lose viewers. Opinionated programs that also try and address opposing viewpoints will do well. If the BBC is to remain in its current form, then maybe it can loosen up and let some conservatives produce a few talk-shows or interview programs. Let the bias be upfront and enjoyable. Give different viewpoints a chance. Let the real Old Labour lefties rip as well, without passing themselves off as purveyors of neutral drama or documentary. One of the oddities of, say, Fox News in the U.S. is that its viewers are by no means all conservatives. Liberals tune in as well, to see and hear viewpoints obscured by the suffocating liberalism of the pseudo-objective networks. No one loses. And politics - especially knowledge and awareness of politics - can only gain. Why not in Britain? And why not soon?

November 17, 2001, Sunday Times of London copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan

-- Anonymous, November 18, 2002