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Correct. Impartiality is good, 'balance' is bad.
The problem with balance is that if something is patently wrong, balance requires you to give the same air time to fruityloops nutters as scientists.
It's not even consistently applied, if it was flat earthers would get a lot more air time.
A lot of people confuse the two: impartiality allows you to take the facts and draw a conclusion based on those facts. A genuinely impartial approach is evident in the Reuters reporting of the pandemic and it ain't flattering for the government.
The BBC's problem is they make examples of rare displays of true impartiality while being supine to the government who control their funding, while claiming to be impartial when they're not because the government controls the purse strings.
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Yep! Though that is not unique to the BBC.
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True, today I was wound up when a presenter was convinced that the track and trace would fall to bits because, (according to people recruited to man the phones in the last few weeks), people who were asked to identify who they had had recent contact with would refuse to divulge details, despite the fact that the NHS experts who have been running similar projects for years for a whole range of diseases, not least HIV, were saying that their experience suggested it wouldn't be an issue.
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Hence we had the (unqualified) Nigel Lawson being given equal airtime as climate scientists who knew what they were talking about.
But they didn't know what Nigel Lawson was talking about, so you had to get Nigel Lawson, because only Nigel Lawson knew what he was talking about. Right?
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The BBC's problem is their foolish belief that impartialty could be satisfied by 'balance'.
'Balance' was ushered in to allow the politically motivated to dispute Climate Change.
Hence we had the (unqualified) Nigel Lawson being given equal airtime as climate scientists who knew what they were talking about.
The blustering Right funded by fossil fuel producers found this 'balance' to be very effective.
Pushed a little further, any criticism of Right wing policies, or continued fossil fuel use is now criticised as a 'lack of balance' or the BBC failing to be impartial.