Why impartial news is just a myth
A look at the shift from what is important to what is engaging
Having worked as a newsroom journalist, I’ve seen firsthand the ins and outs of how news is found, reported on and evaluated.
When you’re in the mix of it all, it’s a totally exhausting job and you don’t really have the headspace for reflection. So, several years later I’m now processing it a bit more and also seeing how the news landscape has changed so much, even in the past five years (Substack-ing as a primary news channel, being a case in point!).
So here are a few thoughts on where I’ve landed with it all – including my thoughts on impartiality, agenda-setting and what makes something newsworthy.
It bugs me when I hear news outlets holding fast to the virtuous claim of impartiality. Yes, it’s possible to have processes and systems in place to make your news fairer, more accurate, more representative etc, but no news outlet is truly impartial.
A story can be reported with the best intentions to be impartial, but take a step back and you’ll see that a decision was made before the story was reported to choose to report that story. It’s not rocket science, I know, but it’s a factor that needs highlighting.
Many of the world’s biggest and most respected news organisations, from the BBC (where I did a stint many years ago) to Reuters and Al Jazeera, are built on this principle. They don't just claim to be impartial; their whole reputation depends on it.
Thankfully, they set out to undertake a rigorous method of fact checking, presenting multiple viewpoints, providing context, and separating factual reporting from opinion.
But even with the best of intentions, this ideal has a fundamental weakness: story selection.
What stories should make the news?
Here’s an example story selection and agenda setting as highlighted by a report from the communications agency Jersey Road.
Over a 12-month period, The Christianity in the News Media 2025 report looked at more than 5,000 stories about Christianity from the UK's most widely accessed online media outlets. They found a disproportionate focus on the Catholic Church, which is referenced in more than 1,200 (24%) stories. This is in contrast to the fast-growing Pentecostal church barely receiving a mention - despite now representing 10 per cent of church attendance in the UK.
CEO Gareth Russell writes:
‘There is a disparity between how faith is presented in online media and what is happening on the ground: that the Catholic Church is disproportionately featured, that the persecuted Church is underreported and that Pentecostal voices are lacking.
‘Our view is that profile and humility are not competing objectives. The opposite of profile is not humility, but rather irrelevance. The world’s most important conversations need voices of humility rather than those who want the platform.’
The act of choosing to cover one story and ignore another is a form of bias. By deciding what we think about, journalists and editors shape our perception of reality before a single word of a report is even written.
I describe it like this:
News is a self-feeding, cyclical process: News outlets imply that something is important and then audiences infer that it is important because it's ‘in the news’; then news outlets infer that audiences want that news content (due to the consumption metrics) so they imply that this news content is important and so produce more of it.
I asked Google Gemini AI to expand on this concept and it helpfully obliged:
It’s a cycle that runs continuously, and it works exactly like this:
The Spark: A news outlet highlights a story. Let's say it's a minor political scandal.
The Signal: You, the audience, see the story featured prominently. You naturally infer that it must be important.
The Click: You click the article or watch the video. This is the crucial modern step. Your engagement is instantly measured.
The Data: The news outlet's systems register this engagement. The data tells them: "The audience wants this."
The Reaction: To capture this demand, the outlet commissions more on the topic – follow-up reports, opinion pieces, "what this means" explainers.
And just like that, the loop is complete and begins again. The renewed coverage reinforces the story's importance, generating more clicks, which in turn justifies even more coverage. A minor scandal has now become the dominant story of the week, not because it was the most important thing happening in the world, but because it was the most engaging. This self-feeding beast runs on clicks and views, and it has profound consequences for all of us.
(Google Gemini, 3 August 2025)
So here we are. A clear shift from what is important to what is engaging.
This system takes the initial problem of story selection and puts it on autopilot, driving it towards sensationalism. This means that pursuing genuine impartiality – which demands covering important stories even when they are not popular – becomes even more difficult.
So what do we do? How do we respond well?
The first step is awareness. I’m grateful that Jersey Road has raised awareness of the skewed news agendas around Christianity and the church. But there’s still much work to do to turn this around.
I’m a churchgoer and have been all my life. In almost every church I’ve attended, the prayers section has referenced ‘some of the things we’ve seen in the news this week’.
So, essentially, our editors and journalists are driving our churches’ prayer agendas. But what about ‘xxx transformational story in the Pentecostal church’ or ‘the xxx number of brutal murders of Christian believers in xxx country this week’. OK, these may not be stories that would be of particular relevance or interest to a non-Churchgoing audience, but they are still happening and achieving less prominent coverage in mainstream news outlets.
Yes, the news landscape is changing at a rate of knots, but that doesn’t stop us changing our relationship with the news.
We can start to ask not just "is this story true?" but "why am I being told this story now?" and, perhaps most importantly, "what am I not being told?”
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I know this article isn’t about my book project Three Stories. That’s still in process and going well. I’ll be back with an important update on that soon!