[...] the practice of impartiality has several inescapable consequences.

(1) It leads broadcasting into the impasse of a false symmetry of issues. All controversial questions must have two sides, and the two sides are usually given a rough equality in weight. Responsibility is shared out between the parties: each side receives a measure of praise or censure. This symmetry of oppositions is a formal balance: it has little or no relevance to the quite unequal relative weights of the case for each side in the real world. If the workman asserts that he is being poisoned by the effluence from a noxious plant, the chairman must be wheeled in to say that all possible precautions are now being taken.… This symmetrical alignment of arguments may ensure the broadcaster’s impartiality, but it hardly advances the truth. Opposition has been neutralized in this maneuver: the political level and the class content of the conflict have been suppressed.

(4) Via impartiality, broadcasting is thus raised above the conflicts which it treats. It seems to stand outside the real play of interests on which it reports and comments. The men and women who produce programs are real social individuals in the midst of the conflicts which they report. But this “subjective” dimension is repressed in the “objectivity” of the program. The programs they produce are outside those conflicts—they reflect on and judge them, but they do not participate in them. As a recent pamphlet on Television and the State observes, “the identifications contained in programmes gain a mysterious validity as they are put forward as being the product of an analytical rationality from outside the society and separate from society and class conflict rather than as the product of a dialectic rationality which includes an understanding and knowledge of the involvements from where the ‘truth’ of the programme is created.” 1