The Explainer answers essential questions about forces reshaping documentary by mapping disparate examples onto coherent frameworks. These pieces analyze industry trends, political economies, and cultural shifts across historical and international contexts, revealing how documentaries are made, distributed, and popularized.
Even by the BBC’s disposition to crisis, 2025 has been an annus horribilis for the corporation: disrupted by new media and assailed by rivals in the old, it reported a £1bn revenue shortfall amid plunging audience trust ratings and licence-fee payments, while its internal cultural failings and editorial controversies drew overlapping rounds of public censure. For the documentary world, some of the BBC’s editorial agonies this year have been particularly distressing to witness, not least the sight of it shelving one film seeking to expose Israel’s slaughter in Gaza while another was under investigation over allegations of bias, which were previously covered in Documentary.
At the heart of many of the conflicts was the question of impartiality, a measure relatively new to the BBC, yet one it has clasped as a mantle in response to partisan pressures and digital echo chambers, fragmenting audiences, and political division.
As both a regulatory requirement for British broadcasters and an elevated self-standard at the BBC, it’s a stricture quite distinct from rules in other countries—not least in the U.S., since the fairness doctrine was abandoned nearly four decades ago.
For documentary filmmakers hoping to work with the BBC or other British broadcasters, what are the requirements and restrictions? How can impartiality be reconciled with the documentary values of truth-seeking, storytelling, and freedom of expression? More widely, for countries under democratic stress and needing safeguards against division and disinformation, is the BBC’s bet right? Is impartiality achievable or even desirable, and who judges it?
Pulled Punches
In February, BBC Two aired Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, made by Hoyo Films and narrated by 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri. When it emerged that al-Yazuri’s father had served as deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas government—a detail originally undeclared—the BBC relabelled the film, then pulled it from its iPlayer streaming service while its production was reviewed by BBC News, the corporation’s Executive Complaints Unit, and ultimately the communications regulator Ofcom. The furor was immediate. Almost 50 Jewish journalists demanded the film’s withdrawal, more than 1,000 Artists for Palestine demanded its reinstatement, the UK culture minister decried “catastrophic failings,” and a former BBC director of television, Danny Cohen, declared the BBC’s commitment to impartiality on the war “lies in tatters.”
As this controversy unfolded, the BBC seemed to get cold feet about another Gaza documentary. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, made by former Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear’s Basement Films, and presented by award-winning reporter Ramita Navai, had gathered evidence the IDF was deliberately targeting Gaza’s health workers. Originally scheduled for broadcast in February, it faced months of delays. In June, after filmmakers went public with criticisms (Navai calling Israel “a rogue state” committing war crimes, de Pear telling a panel at Sheffield DocFest the BBC had “utterly failed” on Gaza and “stymied and silenced” its journalists), the BBC dropped the program, citing concerns about “creating a perception of partiality.” After the filmmakers negotiated for the rights, Channel 4 broadcast it two weeks later.
At the same DocFest panel, Havana Marking described similar frustrations over her documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right, an investigation of far-right networking and funding she’d been making for BBC’s Storyville. Because the film included material on the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, notorious for his use of intimidation and misinformation, Marking was told the film would require an interview with him. “We kept saying: you can’t be impartial about racism; that is not a negotiable thing,” she recalled. They too took it to Channel 4.
Dutch broadcaster VPRO’s international commissioner Barbara Truyen offered a contrasting philosophy. “We have a pluriform system where you show many sides, and the audience can decide what it thinks, she said. “I believe in integrity, I don’t believe in impartiality.”
Had the BBC flinched? Will it call a racist a racist—are there consensus standards that still hold—or has public debate and opinion now shifted so far right that the likes of Tommy Robinson warrant representation in the name of impartiality?
In the case of its withdrawn Gaza reporting, the BBC’s fear of a “perception of partiality” seemed revealing of a confusion: are there accepted standards for achieving impartiality, or can anyone cry foul? Does everyone’s perception count equally? Are editors and top managers vulnerable to perceptions of partiality, or only journalists? Can it really hope to avoid any such perception, from someone, somewhere, ever?
The answers are crucial for the BBC and the future of Britain’s public service broadcasting model, with its charter due for renewal in 2027 and growing calls to change its funding model. Meanwhile, upstarts such as the right-wing GB News are attacking consensus broadcasting standards with the same audacity as their allies on the populist right. Against this backdrop, BBC Director General Tim Davie has doubled down, declaring impartiality the corporation’s “very essence”—and elevating it above accuracy in the 2025 Editorial Guidelines—while pitching the corporation’s unique unifying ability. Can its definition of impartiality meet the moment?
The Surprisingly Short History of Impartiality
Given the primacy of impartiality as a measure of the modern BBC, it has the air of a longstanding precept. In fact, for the BBC it was only made a statutory requirement in 1996. While the BBC’s official historian, Jean Seaton, argues that impartiality was in the corporation’s “founding DNA” and became “a revolutionary new practice,” for its first seven decades it was a self-governed aspiration. Seaton points to the BBC’s reporting on the 1926 General Strike and British setbacks during the Second World War as formative episodes in the growth of a culture of impartiality, one that sought to win the trust of a new mass audience, inform a democratic electorate, and cut through the misinformation of domestic or foreign propagandists.
The principle was formally introduced in the 1946 BBC Agreements with the government, requiring the corporation to “broadcast an impartial account day by day prepared by professional reporters” of parliamentary proceedings. But the first sweeping impartiality clause was devised for the new commercial network ITV. Politicians feared not political bias but commercial influence over the channel’s editorial output when they drafted the 1954 Television Act, requiring “that any news given in programmes (in whatever form) is presented with due accuracy and impartiality,” with a further clause demanding due impartiality on “matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy.”
The BBC only began to align with these regulatory clauses in 1981, through a voluntary or “gentleman’s” agreement declaring it had “always been their objective to treat controversial subjects with due impartiality.”
After a decade of arguments between the Thatcher government and broadcasters—over coverage of everything from the Falklands War and Northern Irish Troubles to the secret services—the 1990 Broadcasting Act elaborated on the required impartiality for commercial channels, now regulated by the Independent Television Commission. The 1996 Agreement imposed similar regulations on the BBC for the first time, though only to the realm of “controversial subjects” rather than “any news,” leaving adjudication in the BBC Trust’s hands until ITC successor Ofcom assumed oversight in 2017.
In the meantime, the 2006 Agreement instructed the BBC to draw up and periodically review an editorial code. Its self-imposed standards for impartiality are more rigorous than Ofcom’s baseline, and have expanded over time. For example, the 2010 guidelines widened the compass beyond public policy or political or industrial controversy to “religion, science, finance, culture, ethics and other matters entirely.” When Tim Davie became director general in 2020, he declared his first priority would be “a renewed commitment to impartiality,” trust in which was “the very essence of who we are.” The 2025 Editorial Guidelines elevated impartiality to the top of the list, above accuracy.
Impartiality, then, is a subjective measure, a judgment call that demands nuance and sensitivity. In other words, experts can also be wrong; challenging regulators’ judgements is another layer of democratic debate.
What Does Impartiality Actually Mean?
While impartiality is a legal requirement for British broadcasters, its enforcement demands individual judgment calls. Impartiality means “not taking sides, reflecting all relevant strands of public debate and challenging them with consistent rigour,” according to the BBC’s 2025 guidelines. The intention is not a rigid formula for both-sideism: only “due” impartiality is required. Though what it counts as “due,” or “adequate and appropriate to the output,” is itself a matter of judgement.
Nor does impartiality imply “detachment from fundamental democratic values,” though the BBC must still be impartial on related controversies and policies arising. Ofcom’s impartiality standards also elaborate that context makes a difference: the approach “may vary according to the nature of the subject, the type of programme and channel, the likely expectation of the audience as to content, and the extent to which the content and approach is signalled to the audience.” Comedy, signposted as such, is treated differently from straight news; so too documentary.
Ofcom specifies rules for “personal view” and “authored” programs, which must be clearly signalled, declare any personal interest of a reporter or presenter, and represent alternative viewpoints either in the program or across a series. Documentary and current affairs are treated as distinct from news, though high-stakes subject matter can bring them back within impartiality requirements. Beyond news, Ofcom imposes rules on “matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current policy” and separately, on “major matters relating to current public policy,” with heightened requirements. Brexit in 2016 qualified, like Israel-Gaza today. Louis Theroux in Las Vegas does not require impartiality; Theroux in the West Bank does.
Chris Banatvala, a media consultant, Sky News board member, and former Ofcom director of standards, says the regulator uses a principle of “settled matters.” For example, anthropogenic climate heating is considered settled fact (“despite what Trump says”) and does not require a counter-claim.
Fairness, here, is different from impartiality. “All those terms: objectivity, neutrality, balance, fairness, impartiality, accuracy, all mean very different things,” says Banatvala. In his description, fairness concerns individuals, ensuring accusations are based on evidence and people have an opportunity to respond. Impartiality concerns subject matter, such as views and opinions. This differs from the U.S. fairness doctrine, by which the FCC between 1949 and 1987 demanded broadcasters’ coverage of important public issues “fairly reflect differing viewpoints”—a rule closer to British impartiality. That regulation, still called for by some on the left as bulwark against big-money support for conservative broadcasting, is opposed not only by the right for its restriction of free speech, but by those who argue diverse viewpoints are better provided across multiple outlets.
This rise of explicitly partisan channels may be the trajectory for British media as the broadcaster landscape widens. As more channels launch, Ofcom has to determine how much latitude it allows startups in the interests of plurality before imposing “regulatory burden.” While it has reprimanded GB News for impartiality breaches, including an “uncontested” pre-election Q&A show with the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and five occasions on which the channel used Tory MPs as newsreaders, Ofcom has been slow to impose fines.
GB News has been swift to denounce Ofcom verdicts as “chilling,” issuing outraged appeals to “free speech and media plurality.” GB News challenged both verdicts in court, overturned the judgment on newsreading, and declared Ofcom’s subsequent attempts to amend its regulations as themselves giving “the impression of partiality.” At one point it even alleged Ofcom had changed its test from “Was it impartial?” to “Could someone think it might not be?” The very “perception of partiality” that the BBC would agonise over with Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was, for GB News, a self-evidently absurd standard.
Can the Rules Hold?
“People think this is easy, and it’s not,” says Banatvala, when I mention rival studies claiming to show the BBC’s anti-Israel or anti-Palestine bias. “Ofcom doesn’t stopwatch things. A five-minute roasting with [the veteran journalist and irascible presenter] Andrew Neil may be more truly impartial than a ten-minute soft soap with someone else. It takes a lot of experienced journalists, editors, and compliance people to get this right.” Impartiality, then, is a subjective measure, a judgment call that demands nuance and sensitivity. In other words, experts can also be wrong; challenging regulators’ judgements is another layer of democratic debate.
That debate, however, is stretching. The BBC believes its impartiality standards can bolster public trust, but to do so, its impartiality procedures need to command trust—an uphill battle in a time of rising social distrust. A Cardiff University research project found the BBC remained Britain’s most trusted news broadcaster (at 48%, versus 18% for GB News) but that demand for impartiality regulation was notably lower among the young (57% support among those aged 18–24, compared with 76% in the 50–64 bracket). Impartiality rules need clear, credible justification. The BBC’s communication around the two Gaza documentaries appeared panicked and timid, clearly caught off guard by revelations about How to Survive a War Zone, cowed when backing away from Doctors Under Fire.
That Channel 4 readily broadcast the film may show the difference between Ofcom and BBC impartiality standards—or that the BBC had indeed lost its nerve. It may have had a point about Navai, the film’s presenter, crossing its latest impartiality guidelines (worked up after a series of media pile-ons over then Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker’s liberal tweets)—as Banatvala says, “good compliance is part of journalism”—though Navai can also argue she was making the permitted “evidence-based assessments.” But its avowed concern to avoid the “perception of partiality” not only sounded naive, as if the heat might one day lift and consensus reign, but betrayed a lack of self-judgment and a refusal to acknowledge perceptions already at large that impartiality can be gamed.
The BBC is regularly assailed by those claiming they do not get a fair shake. Those on the left and the center-left wield figures to prove as much, while Farage regularly weaponizes liberal standards to yell oppression and persecution of his illiberal demands, just as U.S. conservatives wield the cudgel of “liberal bias” across American mainstream media.
But criticism from all sides is not proof of balance, and the perception of a defensive crouch will only encourage opponents to land their blows harder. Nor do “settled matters” necessarily stay settled. As evidence grows more abundant from the US and many other right-turned nations that illiberal challengers who gain power do indeed dismantle liberal settlements and ransack rights and justice in their pursuit of power, the stakes have rarely been higher.
Democratic guardrails need open-eyed, forceful defense. The BBC is clear it sees itself as one of those guardrails, embodying democratic principles: “Impartiality does not mean detachment from fundamental democratic values,” its editorial guidelines assert. That means standing up for truth and justice and against bullies and liars.
Failure to do so would cost the BBC itself dear, and all who rely on it, look up to it, or work with it. Can impartiality meet the task? Could it, even, include integrity? Given the broadcaster’s exposure to political pressures, that looks like more than it can fit.
