“Fair and Balanced”: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News

ABSTRACT

Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-of-view, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 132 individuals in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, conducted in early 2021. Our results show while the idea of impartial news is widely embraced in abstract, ranging from notions of reporting “just the facts” to more nuanced views about how feasible impartiality is to achieve, there is no shared understanding of impartiality in practice. People’s perceptions of impartiality are rooted in two intertwined folk theories: the notion that news production and editorial decisions are guided largely by (a) partisan political agendas or (b) commercial considerations, determining what stories were chosen, ignored, or crafted in order to deceive and manipulate. There is some country variation around the importance of these folk theories, but their recurrence suggests that demonstrating impartiality to audiences requires convincing them not only that news content is balanced but also that editorial decisions were not driven by ulterior motives.

KEYWORDS:

• Impartiality
• trust in news
• objectivity
• news audiences
• in-depth interviews
• folk theories

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some news organizations, for example the BBC in the UK, are required to be impartial. But even in the case of the BBC, there are limits to this requirement. The BBC is required to be duly impartial, meaning that there are a set of values (like respect for democratic principles) about which the organization is not required to remain absolutely impartial, illustrating the different ways in which the concept can be operationalized and enforced.

2 The study was approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC) of the University of Oxford (R72293/RE001).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Meta Journalism Project (CTR00730).