Streamers Should Be Able To Take a Side

It’s journalism 101: news reporters should not ‘have an interest’ in one side of an argument over another. By being ‘disinterested,’ they can be trusted
to offer balance and fairness.

That’s good in theory, but what happens when a journalist is very ‘interested’ because the facts are so damning against one side or the other?

Enter investigative journalism and anything but impartial or disinterested reporting. A reporter takes a side and relentlessly pursues enquiry to support that side because there has been a clear injustice.

The emergence of Amazon Prime and Netflix has been a godsend to investigative types who, like me and my team, take the view in true crime coverage that when one person has killed another and been found guilty in a court of law, we are more than entitled to be interested. This means presenting the prosecution case proportionate to what has been done rather than in equal measure with the defence – to give a voice to victims
who cannot be heard themselves.

Live court reporting, of course, must be balanced, but is it wrong to take the victim’s side when a case is conclusively proved to the satisfaction of a jury? I think not.

And when a homicidal pattern of societal behaviour is seen as the reason innocents lose their lives, then that should be exposed too. Domestic abuse leads to murder; it needs to be policed better.

This takes us to the UK’s draft media bill introduced by the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer. Early manifestations of its intent suggest that she wishes
to see rules in the style of [media regulator] Ofcom relating to impartiality applied to the streaming giants.

Those streamers are not bound by impartiality regulations. They can see an evil and expose it for what it is without fear of complaints related
to balance.

One broadcast partner we work with, bound as it is by regulations, forcefully suggested to us recently that we had to give a convicted killer a right of reply to accusations made against her by the members of the victim’s family. Balanced, maybe, but for a family forever living with the death of their loved one, is that fair?

Discuss, by all means – but not in my book.

Our latest Netflix collaboration, My Lover, My Killer, began with a campaigning element; we wanted to expose the reality of escalating domestic abuse and to illustrate how the tragic issue is policed.

It was balanced in as much as we offered the ‘defence’ given by the perpetrator so viewers could draw conclusions, but it was not disinterested in the traditional sense.

The killer had been found guilty and lost his or her appeals. Society had made its judgement. As it did so, we could all see the failings in a system
that meant violent crime had been overlooked or not policed as well as it should have been.

That simple fact meant we, as journalists, wished to take a side – not to be balanced, but to be appalled at the loss of life and determined to both expose the sinner and the system’s failings.

If this or any other government wants to start policing journalism and the investigative thread alive and well on the streamers, then the regulation
of ‘balance’ will threaten the exposure of wrongs.

And surely that is not the role of government.