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There has been greater news industry recognition in recent years that impartiality should not be translated into simply balancing the competing sides of a debate or issue. The binary nature of a referendum campaign represents a unique moment to consider whether broadcasters have put this into practice beyond routine political reporting. This study examines how impartiality was editorially interpreted in television news coverage during the United Kingdom’s 2016 European Union referendum. We carried out a systematic content analysis of the United Kingdom’s main evening bulletins over the 10-week campaign, examining the issues and sources shaping coverage, as well as all the statistical claims made by campaign actors. Our aim was to critically examine how notions of impartiality were constructed and interpreted, exploring any operational limits and political consequences. Overall, we found that news bulletins maintained a fairly strict adherence to a central binary balance between issues and actors during the campaign. But this binary was politically inflected, with a significant imbalance in party political perspectives, presenting us with a right-wing rather than a left-wing case for European Union membership. We also found that independent expert analysis and testimony was sucked into the partisan binary between leave and remain campaigners, while journalists were reluctant to challenge or contextualise claims and counter-claims. Journalists were, in this sense, constrained by the operational definition of impartiality adopted by broadcasters. We argue for a more evidence-driven approach to impartiality, where journalists independently explore the veracity of campaign claims and have the editorial freedom to challenge them. We also suggest that the reliance on claims and counter-claims by leading Conservative politicians did little to advance public understanding of the European Union, and helped perpetuate a series of long-standing negative associations the British media have been reporting for many decades.

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The use of data is often viewed as a potentially powerful democratic force in journalism, promoting the flow of information sources and enriching debates in the public sphere. We explore a key feature of the relationship between data and journalism, drawing upon the largest ever study of statistical references in news reporting (N = 4285) commissioned by the BBC Trust to examine how statistics inform coverage in a wide range of UK television, radio and online media (N = 6916). Overall, our study provides a cautionary tale about the use of data to enlighten democratic debate. While we found that statistics were often referenced in news coverage, their role in storytelling was often vague, patchy and imprecise. Political and business elites were the main actors referencing statistics and interpreting them, but many of their claims were neither questioned nor interrogated further by journalists, with statistics often traded by opposing sides of an argument without independent analysis. In order to enhance the independent scrutiny of statistics, we argue a radical shift in newsgathering and journalistic interpretation is needed, which allows reporters to draw on a wider range of statistical sources and to adopt more critical judgements based on the weight of statistical evidence.

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Journalism has advanced greatly as a field in its own right in recent decades. As well as a cause for celebration, however, this may give rise to concerns -in particular that scholars may pay increasing attention to the inner workings of journalistic institutions at the expense of their external ties, impact and significance, including their normative ones. It is true that important normative analyses have appeared in the literature, six of which the article defines and exemplifies. So far, however, these ideas have had relatively little influence on the thought or practice of journalists. The article concludes by suggesting a way in which a closer and more constructive dialogue could be achieved between journalism scholars and practitioners, centring on the normative challenges faced by both sides.In this article we aim to review and assess the place of normative ideas in journalism studies. 1 We discern and depict a somewhat mixed picture of them. On the one hand, a number of scholars have made significant contributions over the years to a corpus of normative thought about the media -ones which we attempt to define and classify below.

In this article we draw on a specific case study -the re-regulation of BBC political reporting in the nations and regions in the UK post-devolution -to compare the BBC's interventionist, public service framework with the 'light touch' regime of commercial broadcasting. We carried out a content analysis of BBC Television News (where issues of accuracy and impartiality are regulated by the BBC Trust), and three commercially funded channels (where programme content is entirely regulated by Ofcom) before and after an editorial intervention by the BBC Trust.We found that the BBC improved the balance and accuracy of its television news coverage whereas commercial broadcasters continued to overlook or misrepresent the reality of devolved politics in the UK. While it can be difficult to demonstrate empirically how regulation can enhance media content compared to a 'light touch' system -as our study found -we suggest that the impact of regulatory interventions should be more central to journalism studies internationally.