My problem with Emma Barnett: why BBC presenters shouldn’t editorialise
(Photo by Lia Toby/Getty Images)
When, if ever, should news presenters, editorialise about contentious news stories? Is it their job to give their own opinions or should they keep them to themselves? And why is this becoming a growing problem at the BBC, where a number of well-known presenters have recently used their programmes to hold forth about their own thoughts about politics, racism and anti-Semitism?
Emma Barnett is one of the best presenters on the BBC. She has her own show on BBC Five Live and is a regular presenter on Newsnight. She is clever and funny and a welcome addition to the BBC.
On Monday 27 July she began her show talking about Wiley, a Black rapper, nicknamed “the godfather of grime”, who posted a number of anti-Semitic tweets last week which led to a massive boycott of Twitter after they had failed to close down his account. What Barnett said was passionate and heartfelt. She talked about her grandmother, a Jewish refugee from Austria, and her husband’s grandmother who had survived Auschwitz.
She quoted some of Wiley’s more offensive remarks and told listeners how she felt reading his comments: ‘Those words burn… [T]hey burn deep. They are deeply dispiriting and play on a very well-hidden fear a lot of Jewish people have: that someday anti-Semitism will rise up once more. Because anti-Semitism is fresh and raw for us.” Her monologue can be read in full on The Jewish Chronicle’s website. I agreed with every word. She spoke eloquently and powerfully for six minutes and there has been an impressive response on Twitter.
During the Corbyn years, many criticised the mainstream media, and the BBC, in particular, for failing to speak out about the rising tide of anti-Semitism on the left. Why the silence on flagship programmes when many Jews felt threatened by the left’s hostility? Anti-Semitism, it seemed, was back in Britain.
So, what’s my problem with Emma Barnett? Why am I concerned with her eloquent words when I agree with what she said and respect her as a broadcaster?
It is not the job of BBC news presenters to editorialise or to give their opinions about news stories, or about their feelings in response to these stories. Emma Barnett is free to interview experts about anti-Semitism like Dave Rich, author of The Left’s Jewish Problem. To be fair, she did go on to interview Karen Pollock from the Holocaust Education Trust. But that interview should have followed a brief, neutral introduction not a polemical, opinionated and very personal monologue by Barnett herself.
This is not the first time a BBC presenter has used their privileged position to express their own views. In May 2019, the BBC said that Emily Maitlis’s introduction to Newsnight which discussed the row over Dominic Cummings going to Durham during lockdown, “did not meet our standards of impartiality”. The programme began with Maitlis saying that “the country can see” Cummings had “broken the rules”, and that the country was “shocked”. The “public mood” she said, was “one of fury, contempt and anguish”, and that Mr Cummings had made people who struggled to keep to the government’s rules “feel like fools”.
Naga Munchetty is a journalist and presenter on BBC Breakfast. Last July, she criticised President Trump’s controversial comments telling a group of Congressional critics who were women of colour, to “go back” to the “places where they came from.” Munchetty said on BBC Breakfast, “Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism. Now I’m not accusing anyone of anything here, but you know what certain phrases mean.” In September, she was ruled to have breached the BBC’s guidelines. Her defenders attacked the BBC saying that presenters or reporters should not be impartial about racism. The BBC got itself into an almighty tangle and Lord Hall overturned the BBC’s decision about Munchetty.
Three times in fourteen months, leading BBC news presenters have expressed their own opinions about controversial news stories. What’s going on at the BBC? Why have old editorial guidelines about neutrality been ignored?
The timing is terrible. The BBC is increasingly under fire for being out of touch with middle England, for attacking Brexit and the government, and for championing “woke” views about race, gender, colonialism and slavery. Ratings are falling and yet the BBC seems happy to carry on lecturing its audience about politics and identity. On a whole number of issues, from Israel to Brexit, it no longer seems neutral. Since the BBC is reluctant to put its house in order, it is time for an independent review of BBC news programmes and changes at the top.
