“Journalists have to stop pretending to be pure and neutral and bloodless and unbiased” – Charles Beckett, yesterday

Published: March 26, 2013 at 10:25am

Charles Beckett, a founding director of a journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics, speaking about social media and journalism at a Strickland Foundation Lecture last night, said that journalism has to be social if it is to survive and thrive

“Journalists have to stop pretending to be pure and neutral and bloodless and unbiased,” he said, calling on those who work in the field to be “more honest about who they are”.

So right. I’ve always been quite clear in my mind that one of the reasons for my strong readership over what I believe to be an otherwise unparalleled 23 unbroken years is that people always know exactly what I’m thinking because I don’t fudge it or pretend not to have views.

The whole point of being a columnist is having those views. If you don’t have views to the point where you can claim to be disinterested or neutral, then you’re in the wrong business. Who gives a damn about a columnist who doesn’t have strong views about anything or is ‘neutral’? What’s the point of a neutral columnist – that’s about as useful as a bucket with a hole in it.

Of course, not all journalists are columnists and Beckett was talking about the wider field. And yes, I think he’s right in that journalism has now become highly personalised and people want to know – even in news reports – the perspective of the person doing the reporting. But they also want that person to be honest about where he or she is coming from.




15 Comments Comment

  1. Manuel says:

    At the Strickland Foundation? Interesting. One should hope that the journalists of The Times took notes during the lecture and put them into action.

  2. Andre' Vella says:

    You are not a journalist. You write op-ed.

    Researching facts for your pieces does not make you a journalist, which is why you do not abide by the code of journalistic ethics.

    [Daphne – I love being hectored on this subject by people who haven’t a clue. Of course I’m a journalist. I have been one for practically the whole of my adult life. People who write newspaper columns for a living (which I have done since I was 25) are journalists. News photographers are journalists. Reporters are journalists. Newspaper editors are journalists. Feature writers who write about art and design are journalists. And you need to stick to what you know. I’ll tell you somebody who isn’t a journalist: those in the Super One newsroom. They are classed as propagandists.]

  3. Alexander Ball says:

    Spot on.

    I guess Malta being such a small place, people are scared of being as outspoken as you for fear of getting bother with those they write about.

    Normal rules don’t apply here.

    Whereas to me, you are perfectly normal, I get the feeling most of the island think of you as freakish – ‘a woman with a brain who uses it’.

    Facebook is perfect for Malta – a morass of platitudinal bollocks for the ‘tell me what to think about this subject’ masses.

    How disturbing to witness thousands of people dismissing the evidence of their own eyes.

  4. c Borg says:

    Daphne I’ve read your columns a few times and you’re absolutely right, columnists/journalists should state their views, however if they are biased they must state so, otherwise they should just report the real news.

    [Daphne – ‘If they are biased they must state so’. You miss the point of my piece: those who have no opinions shouldn’t be working as journalists anyway, whether they are reporters or not. If your job is to be au fait with the facts and with important situations, and still you have no opinion about them, there is something deeply wrong with you and you are not fit for the job. This is my point. You cannot engage readers, viewers and listeners if you are not engaged yourself.]

    You are a great writer but honestly you are so anti everything that is not nationalist that your credibility goes out the window for me.

    [Daphne – You are so, so wrong. I was the only one vociferously critical of the way the last government handled certain issues in the Libya crisis and even more so in the divorce issue. Along the way, there have been several other matters in which I was more outspoken in criticism even than the Opposition press, and more accurate too because it was real criticism and not character assassination. The fact of the matter is that the two parties are so unequal in every way that there is simply no comparison – they are just two completely different animals. It is obvious that I am going to have more positive things to say about the Nationalist government and almost nothing positive to say about Labour, because just look at it. The vote of the majority is not a validation of quality. You can see that in many aspects of life where people make independent choices. The assessment of quality has to be made independently of what the majority choose. The irony you miss is that I am called biased when mine is the quintessentially unbiased assessment, given that I am an intelligent person who literally had to make a choice who to vote for based on what I saw. This is what the Labour Party can’t stand: it attacks my credibility precisely because I have credibility given that I was NOT raised in a Nationalist household.]

    It is impossible that everything labour does is bad and the nationalists never do anything wrong. anyone living in Malta the last ten years can produce a list a mile long of wrongdoings by the previous administration. I didnt see you report on that.

    If you work for the PN, thats fine, but put a big sign on your website that says “Employed by the PN” so as to not mislead the uninformed.

    [Daphne – I don’t work for the Nationalist Party and I never have. I don’t need to. I write about politics for a living and you have to face the fact that I have examined the Labour Party closely over my lifetime and found it deeply, deeply wanting. I have also examined the Nationalist Party and found that it is best placed to run the country, and the facts have proved me correct on my choice. I distinguish between petty rubbish and the bigger picture, and this is not a sign of bias. It is a sign of intelligence. I hate having to say this myself, but it has to be said. You cannot equate my reasoning with that of the man in the street for the simple reason that I am not the man in the street and that is exactly why I am fit for my job as a political columnist. If that were not the case, we would all be political columnists.]

    P.S. I dont support either party blindly as I have a brain.

    [Daphne – Support for a political party is not ‘blind’. It is rational. You are not the first one to think that refusing to endorse either political party is a sign of superior intelligence. Quite obviously, it is not. It is the opposite of that.]

    • Catherine says:

      “otherwise they should just report the real news”…like a fact sheet? Is that what you want? With no one around to even ask (1) if these facts are in fact facts and (2) whether these facts are right (by right i refer to the moral dimension of every human situation).

      It’s amazing to think the Berlin Wall ever came down (just as an example), when human beings have the capacity to think this way.

      • C Borg says:

        Catherine the real news is questioning everything and reporting everything, not what suits you or your opinion.

  5. Peter F says:

    I’m curious to know how many The Times journalists were present at this lecture.

  6. Min Jaf says:

    Ghandek cans!

    The performance of journalists attending televised media conferences in the lead up to the general election consistently showed their inability or unwillingness to dig deep into any matter at issue.

    The situation is further aggravated by editors selectively failing to publish certain reports, or to sanitize or skew their intended message, in furtherance of political ends.

  7. rc says:

    Completely agree. I would rather see a labour sympathiser grill PN politicians and vice versa. That way, you are (somewhat) assured that whether consciously or not, the journalists are not giving their subjects an easy time just because they happen to be on the same side.

    To do that effectively, it needs to be well known what the journalist’s views are.

  8. ciccio says:

    I am not sure if the topic came up, but to me it sounds like Mr. Beckett was dealing with the subject of ‘political correctness.’

    I am posting a link below to quotes about the topic.

    The quotes are self explanatory.

    http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/political_correctness.html

  9. maws says:

    bendy bus boris meets biased journalist out for blood:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j12VvolRMs

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