Welcome to the Media Society’s latest Substack. This edition features former BBC TV and radio executive Roger Mosey analysing the shutting down of BBC programmes like The World Tonight and the Midnight News.
The Media Society Substack covers current media issues, and includes articles written by leading practitioners and experts in the world of media.
The BBC Cutbacks
The cuts announced by the BBC this month mean that it will soon be farewell to The World Tonight, the Midnight News, Money Box Live and a swathe of Radio 4 programming. In audio more generally, up to 400 fewer hours per year will be commissioned; and 100-150 hours of network television content will disappear. It is a bleak picture - with more announcements still to come - and part of the BBC’s target of a further £500 million of savings. Matt Brittin truly faces the toughest task of any incoming director-general.
Yet he was right to say when he took up the post that the BBC is needed more than ever. It is, he said, our “most trusted news provider, the cornerstone of our creative economy, and a force that brings people together”. As misinformation and disinformation swirl around the globe, audiences will want to know what is true – and the BBC can provide a place where our querulous nation can share its views. The onslaught of YouTube, Netflix, Disney and the rest means that we risk having most of our viewing choices made by giant American companies, with algorithms devised in Palo Alto replacing editorial choices made in Britain.
So, part of the answer to “how did we get here?” is that the digital era really happened: there was an explosion of choice, which has been good for the consumer, and a transformation in how we get our information, which is much more contentious. Just look at what happened recently in the Belfast riots, fuelled by social media.
But we have also seen in the last 15 years a steady defunding of the BBC. The lobby group British Broadcasting Challenge estimates that the corporation has lost up to 40% of its income in real terms since 2010 – equivalent to £2.7 billion. It is easy to blame Conservative governments for this, though some of the efficiency savings were justified, and the BBC could not avoid the austerity being imposed on the rest of the public sector. Questions arise, though, about how the BBC has responded to the prolonged downturn in its income – and whether its strategy for survival has been the right one.
BBC executives naturally want to get on with governments because their future is in their hands. But a decade ago, one leading figure murmured to me that the 2015 licence fee settlement - giving the BBC the responsibility for the over-75s licences, which it had earlier vigorously resisted - was part of “the worst charter renewal ever”. The BBC claimed it had got “the right deal”, but it was done precipitately and secretly.
Spool forward to the present day and the BBC seems, if media reports are correct, to have entertained the idea that the licence fee might be reduced – albeit in return for trying to get more people to pay by making it a requirement for access to streaming services too. I can see why the Treasury and the DCMS want to support their cost-of-living agenda by reducing costs for families; but there comes a point when the BBC should be bolder about what it actually needs.
Instead, we have seen an uncertain response by the Corporation in the shape of its offerings to the public. BBC Three, a TV channel designed to appeal to a younger audience, was created in 2003, then scrapped in 2016 – only to be brought back in 2022. It now exists as an underfunded ghost. This suggests a lack of grip about the future of linear and digital services. An internal idea about merging BBC Two and BBC Four - to create a single channel of excellence - goes back to at least 2012, but it has not happened. Every time the BBC faces cuts, its DG promises “no more salami slicing” and is then found vigorously slicing sausages.
This latest set of cuts is particularly mystifying. First, they seem to have emerged relatively suddenly: Brittin himself said he wasn’t aware of them during the recruitment process. The BBC has implied that they are needed because of a continuing fall in payment of the licence fee, but they haven’t said how or why this is different from their projections. So, at the very least we should have transparency about where the business planning process has gone wrong.
But there is also the question of what the cuts actually are. A midnight news bulletin on Radio 4, which costs very little, is about as close to a core offering as you can get – and yet it will also disappear. “Is it shroud-waving?” wonders one former senior executive; and it would be worth knowing whether, when the culture secretary Lisa Nandy gave the BBC an inflation-linked increase in the licence fee last year, she was informed that the Corporation wouldn’t be able to afford some of Radio 4’s noteworthy programming. Instead, news bosses told their staff: “our story teams will have new platform priorities, with digital and social at the top, and specific targets for audience growth”. In other words, online clicks will matter more than TV and radio.
So, we end up in a worrying place. A friendly government has not yet addressed the future of the BBC with sufficient seriousness, and the BBC itself has been hesitant in making its case, and we still have no agreed alternative to the dying licence fee. It truly is time for everyone of goodwill to put their energy into finding solutions that will reinvigorate the BBC, and not doom it to decline and irrelevance.
About the Author
Roger Mosey is a former senior BBC executive. His roles included Editor of the Today programme, Controller of Radio 5 Live, Head of Television News and Director of Sport. After leaving the BBC in 2013, he was Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
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Roger Mosey knows that senior BBC executives, old and new, mess with R4 audiences at their peril.
The end of the World Tonight and the Midnight News will see the end of serious domestic News coverage on Radio 4 after 1830 each weekday.
5 Live has become a cross between almost continuous Sports coverage and a Local Radio style chat station. There is now little domestic news coverage through the night.
It could be argued the BBC has already ceded 24 hour national radio news coverage to LBC News.
On television, what was once UK dominated BBC News 24 has become World News from Singapore and Washington with a UK rolling news ticker and the occasional “opt out” to cover big UK news stories.
Holding your core R4 audience through the day in spite of the demographics justifies the Licence Fee arguably more than holding on to audiences for 6 Music, R3 or the Asian Network or to servicing social media.
The end of the BBC is truly growing closer when licence fee payers see cuts to core services rather than to what many may regard as multi faceted minority interest programming.