Impartiality in dispute: metalinguistic negotiation and journalistic practice

Impartiality remains a widely endorsed but deeply contested value in journalism. While audiences and institutions continue to esteem it, the term has been invoked to capture divergent models, from balance and comprehensiveness to neutrality, just-the-facts reporting, pragmatic objectivity, and adversarial contestation. This paper argues that such disputes are best understood as cases of metalinguistic negotiation (Plunkett, D., and T. Sundell. 2013. “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.” Philosophers’ Imprint 13 (23): 1–37; Plunkett, D., and T. Sundell. 2023. “Varieties of Metalinguistic Negotiation.” Topoi 42 (4): 983–999. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09941-2): disagreements not about what ‘impartiality’ means descriptively, but about what it should mean in guiding practice. Using (Plunkett, D. 2015. “Which Concepts Should We Use? Metalinguistic Negotiations and the Methodology of Philosophy.” Inquiry 58 (7–8): 828–874. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2015.1080184) criteria, I show that both institutional debates, such as those within the BBC, and scholarly exchanges meet the conditions for metalinguistic negotiations. To make sense of these, I draw on (Brigandt, I. 2010. “The Epistemic Goal of a Concept: Accounting for the Rationality of Semantic Change and Variation.” Synthese 177 (1): 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9623-8) framework, which links concepts to the goals they are designed to serve. I then defend a pluralist account: rather than a single, all-purpose concept, journalistic practice may benefit from distinct concepts of impartiality, each suited to specific aims and domains. Misapplications across contexts can lead to serious distortions, as seen in climate change coverage where impartiality-as-balance obscured consensus and fostered disinformation.