6th September 2024

BBC NEWS

Am I the only one to notice a change in the tone of seriousness on the BBC News? The give-away for me is when either the presenter or their guests refer not to ‘this programme’ but rather ‘this/your show’.  This seems to indicate that instead of a concern to inform and educate the object now is to entertain.  Rather than a concern for the unbiased presentation and serious discussion of what is happening in the nation and the world today, the concern is increasingly with the world of amusement and fun. Certainly Lord Reith did have all three words in the BBC mission statement – Inform, Educate and Entertain but that was to cover the whole range of programmes not just the news item.

Today an inordinate amount of time is given to news of media-created celebrities in pop culture which is made worse by BBC programmes spending too much time on advertising themselves – adverts used to be the province of ITV and similar channels, not BBC 1 and 2.

All this comes at the expense of news of the wider world. Whilst Ukraine and Israel-Gaza are well covered, other areas of conflict such as  Myanmar, Venezuela-Guyana, Somalia and the Sudan, to name but three locations where violence and deprivation are all too obviously present, have received all too little attention. Beyond that there seems too little concern to report good news: the wholly admirable response of the human spirit to tragedy, both individual and communal, today’s great story of sacrifice and service.

And when it comes to religious news there seems to be a fair amount of illiteracy amongst presenters and programme organisers, whilst the free churches, without a recognisable hierarchical structure, are largely ignored.

So three cheers for Tyndale’s Thoughts for the Day which do locally what we are too often denied nationally.

John Briggs