Big Smoke and bias

This week when out on my travels for Big Smoke I’ve had a number of conversations about what Big Smoke “stands for” and what the relationship is between progressive politics and journalism.

You can, of course, check out our about us section on where we are coming from and our submissions guidelines which touches on our general approach.

Although we’re a work in progress there is a clear agenda. “Although we’re a bunch of lefty, progressive types who knit our own yoghurt and insist on locally sourcing our organic hemp that doesn’t mean we are attempting to channel Lenin or talk like a text book.”

It’s important to be upfront and honest about where you’re coming from. The Daily Mail has “Hurrah For The Blackshirts!” on its front page so you know where it’s coming from when it’s having a pop at gay people or travellers. Actually Charlie Brooker says that “the Mail isn’t technically a newspaper, more a serialised Necronomicon” but let’s leave that aside.

It’s only fair that you know where we’re coming from when we back the St Pancras cleaners or support local businesses like the Big Green Bookshop. What we’re not going to do is get all tribal or start reporting what’s happening simply to conform to our ‘line’ or ignore inconvenient facts. We’ve said both nice things and critical things of all the parties on the assembly for example, and we’re going to try to keep up that impartial approach, although the comments will always be open so we can be pulled up when you think we’re being  unfair or made a bad call.

One way we hope to avoid the trap of using stories as vehicles for our own prejudices is to keep giving a voice to others, in their own words where possible. We recognise that “There’s a wealth of people out there active in their communities or plugging away for Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, local community groups, trade unions and others that simply don’t have a real voice in London. We’d like to give them a vehicle for their aspirations, let people know about the good work they are doing and take it from there.”

That’s going to take work, but we think it is worth trying to create that platform to help lift those community voices higher. It would be completely contradictory if we wanted to hear a number of different voices and build some sort of single theological line at the same time – you can’t have both.

There is not a single publication on the planet that does not have it’s own agenda but that can’t ever be an excuse to disregard facts or to deliberately distort what’s happening. Evidence is not simply important to us, it’s part of where we are coming from. We’re not going to play fast and loose with the story. It’s important to us that our readers can trust what they read even if, as imperfect human beings, mistakes are bound to crop up from time to time.