Our top headline tonight - those left-wing pinko scum are at it again!
BBC Editors Blog: Taking Sides
Audience fragmentation raises questions for TV news, says Ofcom
How do you get people who don't watch the news, to engage in it? Well Ofcom have had an interesting idea. Maybe abandoning the requirement for broadcast news to be impartial will help.
It's a huge topic in itself, and then the BBC's Rod McKenzie wades into the debate...
Rod's name will be familiar to some as the bloke who read the news in Simon Mayo's Breakfast Show on Radio 1 in the 1980s. These days he's the man in charge of Radio 1 and 1xtra's news programming, which gives him a bit of an insight into how the "yoot" deal with news - one of the audiences who aren't particularly engaging with Huw Edwards etall.
Rod's comments on the concept of impartiality putting audiences off, put the argument far better that I could. To quote him:
Our problem at the BBC in news is while that many audiences respect what we do - some younger and ethnic minority audiences are put off - not by impartiality - but by our inability to make it matter to them. We don't do enough to explain why these apparently dull stories are interesting and relevant: we don't do enough to make them accessible. Our agenda is sometimes too narrow to feel anything other than a conversation between some middle-aged people from which others are excluded by lack of background knowledge or the tone of the discussion.
Personally I've always had a huge amount of respect for Radio 1's news coverage - it was a combination of them and John Craven that got me interested in what's going on in the world in the first place because they were accessible, interesting and relevant to the audience.
Will attempting a partisan approach make news bulletins fit into those categories for those audiences who avoid the normal bulletins? It seems unlikely. Rod's obviously not keen. In his closing paragraph, he leaves us with this thought:
I think what young audiences want is robust, interesting, passionate debate about stories and issues that affect them and their lives. The voices we hear should be more outspoken, less impartial and from wider, and yes, more extreme, viewpoints. But the glue that holds this together should be the context and impartiality of our journalism - true to it's founding ideals. We should give everyone a say - at the moment we don't always do this. When we do, we'll be stronger, and younger audiences will respect us for it.
