Charles Moore has written a brilliant column in today’s Telegraph in which he responds to Nick Robinson’s peevish complaint that GB News doesn’t have to satisfy the same ‘impartiality’ requirements as the BBC. He deftly demonstrates that when it comes to trans issues, reputable media companies that shout about their ‘impartiality’ from the rooftops are uninhibited about taking the side of trans rights activists.
A small but interesting example has come my way. Over the past decade, fierce disagreements have emerged among feminists and gay activists about aspects of the trans question. While many have been happy to associate trans ideology with lesbian and gay activism, others have not, disagreeing with the idea that, as they put it, you can “get rid of biology”.
In 2019, the LGB Alliance (note the absence of the “T” from the name) was formed because of this split and is now a charity. Some of its leading lights are former trustees of Stonewall, frustrated by what they see as a refusal to discuss the issues involved.
The LGB Alliance naturally tries to advance its work with the media. One important media player is Thomson Reuters, which describes itself as “the world’s largest news and information-based tools to professionals”. Thomson Reuters has a philanthropic arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which works, it says, “to advance media freedom”, identifying disinformation and “the resulting erosion of public trust in news sources” which “undermines accurate and impartial journalism”. It is part of the Trusted News Network.
An offshoot of the Thomson Reuters Foundation is Openly, which describes itself as “a global digital platform delivering fair, accurate and impartial LGBT+ news to a world that isn’t”.
The LGB Alliance has for some time felt frustrated by the lack of coverage it receives from Openly. At the beginning of this year, Kate Harris, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, wrote to Hugo Greenhalgh, the editor of Openly, asking for a meeting to establish a better news relationship. (An earlier attempt at engagement in 2020 had failed.) Mr. Greenhalgh initially agreed to a Zoom call but then fell over a pavement slab and postponed. He then postponed again, explaining that his boss was sending him to Ukraine and that he had a lot of other things to do.
With Mr. Greenhalgh’s latter reply, the LGB Alliance also received a presumably unintended extra. It was an email to Mr. Greenhalgh from Yasir Khan, editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. It said: “AZ almost never interferes with editorial … This is more about risk reduction … Now that we’ve de-escalated and bought ourselves a bit of time, let’s … work out a plan to retain editorial independence AND manage the risk.”
“AZ” is Antonio Zappulla, the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Khan/Greenhalgh email would seem to imply that Mr. Zappulla had forbidden any meeting with the LGB Alliance, and to hint at some embarrassment in an organisation that claims to believe in editorial independence. “Risk reduction” would appear to mean how best to keep in with LGBT+ groups hostile to any contact with the LGB Alliance.
The LGB Alliance chair, Eileen Gallagher, a former managing director of London Weekend Television, knows about media. Armed with Mr. Greenhalgh’s accidental leak, she wrote to him (copied to his bosses) to ask what risk there was in a “get to know you” meeting with a charity active in the field covered by Openly. She said Mr Zappulla’s intervention to prevent it was “quite astonishing”. How could it fit with Openly’s declared mission of being “the world’s most trusted destination for impartial LGBT+ news”?
The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s final response was a letter to Ms Gallagher sent on April 25th. In it, Mr. Khan said that the LGB Alliance’s purpose of establishing a “potential news relationship” with Openly was illegitimate, because “we do not explore news relationships or news partnerships with interest groups and will not be pressured into doing so”.
As a former editor myself, I find this strange. All sensible media outlets need relationships with relevant interest groups. These are not to control news, but simply links so that information can be shared on a basis of trust. A news organisation with no such relationships would be very short of contacts and therefore of news.
Besides, Mr. Khan’s words are inconsistent with his own organisation’s behaviour. It is bound to have news relationships with various interest groups. On its website it also mentions numerous “partnerships”, including ones with several commercial companies, to help pay for the Openly platform.
I sought to discuss all this with Mr. Khan but was told he was away. My request to talk to Mr. Greenhalgh met with no response. The Thomson Reuters Foundation gave me a statement that repeated much of what Mr Khan had already said to Ms. Gallagher, adding: “The matter was escalated to the editor-in-chief and the CEO, whose responsibility is to protect the impartiality and integrity of our journalism in keeping with Foundation’s mission. It is on this basis that the CEO advised against such a meeting.”
So the CEO, who supposedly does not interfere in editorial independence, did intervene to prevent the editor seeing a bona fide group in the area on which his title reports. Where was Thomson Reuters’ foundational impartiality?
I fear this story illustrates a real difficulty. Many powerful media organisations today regard LGBT+ and some other issues, such as climate change and aspects of race, as matters about which the normal idea of impartiality is suspended. There can only be one right approach, they believe. This is clearly the attitude of Openly, which may well provide a useful service to people interested in these matters, but is emphatically not impartial, invariably following the line of LGBT+ lobbies.
So long as such organisations think this way – and that is how Nick Robinson’s own BBC thinks – projects like ‘Verify’ will be more like vigilantism against rivals than the disinterested pursuit of truth. What they see as “disinformation” will often be little more than their preferred word for attitudes they dislike or stories they wish to suppress.
Worth reading in full.
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