Bankers, bonuses and impartiality

I've a hunch that reporting the banks' bonus round is going to be quite some test for journalists' impartiality - at least, for those of us in broadcast journalism who have that obligation.

There's a lot at stake. For instance, the billions that seem likely to be making their way soon into the share portfolios and bank accounts of the men and women who, without taxpayers' intervention, would have run any number of our banks into the ground.

At stake, too, is the coalition government's 'fairness agenda' - and, as far as many in the audience would see it, the truth or otherwise of Chancellor George Osborne's assertion that 'we're all in this together'.

Indeed, if I were back in one of my former editor seats, I'd be wondering whether or not the bankers' bonus season has the capacity to undermine the Coalition much more fundamentally than the row over student fees.

The problem from the impartiality point of view is that any editor will know how many in their audience believe that it's simply wrong for bankers to trouser in a single year a quantity of cash (or its equity equivalent) that dwarfs the amount they themselves are likely to earn in a lifetime.

BBC Business Editor Robert Peston captures the thought succinctly: 

"As the UK's banks still have £200 billion of support from the Credit Guarantee Scheme and Special Liquidity Scheme to repay, and since RBS is still benefiting from loss insurance underwritten by taxpayers, and since Lloyds and RBS are still semi-nationalised, and since all the big banks are trading with the benefit of an implicit promise from the state that they won't be allowed to fail, well some would say the payment of billions of pounds in bonuses at this juncture looks a bit odd."

It may well be, as Robert Peston explains, that there's something quintessentially British about becoming 'stressed' at the amounts bankers are prepared to pocket.

And if it's true that Americans and the Swiss and Germans don't get so hot under the collar as we Brits do, that makes the impartiality job even tougher.

It's a challenge at the best of times to put the pro-bonus case. And there's not much of it.

It boils down to this. That we need to keep the best banking talent here in the country earning profits and the taxes that go with them. And we can't afford to upset the financial services apple-cart, since it's one of the few things we now do.

As the former Conservative MP, columnist and broadcaster Matthew Parris put it bluntly on Any Questions?:

"If in a free market economy you know how to stop greedy private business paying each other too much, put it into law. If you don't, stop posturing about it."

Those realities - if that's indeed what they are - will, I'm sure, sound thin when set against the visceral feeling amongst our various audiences that there's something unfair going on.

The question is whether, in reporting the bonus season impartially, it's right to adopt a 'balanced' position - an 'on the one hand, on the other' approach every time. And, irrespective of the weight of opinion the other way, state the bankers' case each time the story's covered.

Or whether - as impartiality, unlike objectivity or neutrality, allows - we journalists are entitled to make the impartial judgment that the arguments and evidence point in one direction only.