BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Thanks very much. Can you be impartial?

There is a multitude of situations where it's certainly expected of us,

if you're a judge or a juror, a referee or police officer, a teacher grading exams,

or a parent negotiating the competing demands of their kids.

The BBC has published new social media guidelines for some of its presenters,

specifying how and when they can stray, though not very far,

from the golden path of impartiality, and actually telling us what they think about something.

Not news journalists, though, they,

and I'm one of them, are required to hold the line, while nevertheless trying to sidestep inevitable

accusations of bias. Meanwhile, Offcom recently ruled against GB News for having two Tory MPs interviewing

the Tory Chancellor, though impartiality breaches in broadcasting tend not to be quite so audacious.

In everyday life, most of us pay lip service to impartiality as an important moral value.

But impartiality is a problem for human beings, particularly because we are human beings.

We are partial by instinct. We tend to tilt in the

direction of our own in-group, whoever they may be. And though many of us these days have had

our prejudices exposed in corporate unconscious bias courses, some psychologists doubt that it's

ultimately possible to escape our cognitive tendency to favour people like ourselves.

Maybe that's what G.K. Chesterton meant when he denounced impartiality as a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Is he right? Is impartiality an enticing myth tonight's moral maze? Our panel,

Mona Sadiqi, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies, the priest and writer

Giles Fraser, the journalist Ash Sarker from Navarra Media, and the free speech campaigner

...