Sharpe's Opinion

The BBC Should Stop its TV News

Stumbling and Mumbling says the BBC should stop broadcasting TV and Radio News and should re-dedicate its resources toward the BBC News website and making in-depth documentary programmes dealing with the issues. I have entirely stopped watching television news, and am far happier for it, so I’m absolutely in agreement. He also gives 6 very good reasons:

1. TV especially is not the right medium for news. Stories are rarely illuminated by egomaniacs waving their arms. News is better suited to the web, which has the virtues of immediacy and flexibility; if pictures or sounds improve a story, the web can carry them, and if not, it can bin them. The web also better allows reporters to explain what’s going on, as Mark Easton’s and Robert Peston’s blogs demonstrate.

2. Reducing expensive news-gathering would release resources for better programming. News could be replaced by quality documentaries; an understanding of the Israeli-Gaza conflict would surely be better promoted by historical documentaries than necessarily partial reports of who’s lobbing bombs at whom.

3. The 24-hour news cycle has had a wholly pernicious effect upon politics, encouraging soundbites, spin and news management over the content of policy-making. Abolishing news-gathering would force political change.

4. In withdrawing from news, demand for newspapers might revive, which might encourage a greater diversity of news and analysis.

5. News can be provided by the private sector; there’s no market failure which justifies it being done by a public sector organization. It is, however, possible that there is a market failure which causes the under-provision of BBC4-type programmes.

6. Reducing news would de-politicize the BBC, taking a huge step towards the (false) idea of impartiality. There’s a danger of the BBC becoming a political football, kicked around by loud-mouths who verge upon the mentally ill; I suspect a lot of the manufactured fuss about the Ross-Brand business was a sublimation of anger at the BBC‘s political reporting. In withdrawing from news-gathering, and moving up-market, the BBC would not have to worry so much about appeasing such mobs.

To these I would add a seventh reason: The BBC was created with a mandate to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ the British public. Their watered-down and shallow news coverage does none of the above, and more informational (as opposed to ‘sensational’) programming would address this problem. Leave 24-hour news broadcasting to popularist Sky News and ITV. We can have a better class of current affairs coverage from the BBC – who should be leading, not following.

Plus, the BBC News website (actually, the whole BBC website, when you consider iPlayer) is, I think, still the best site on the internet. Not only does it densly pack lots of varied information (including video and audio content) onto one easy-to-read front page, but it does so while maintaining excellent standards for accessibility and other web design concerns. More investment in websites from the BBC can only be a good thing