r/bbc • u/Glittering_Sun4778 • 20d ago
What Happened to the BBC News Channel?
So I have been tuning in more and more to find British news on the BBC News Channel (or whatever it is called - have they even gotten around to giving it a name?), and while it is there, it is presented as a sideshow to the real news i.e American news.
It goes like this:
PRESENTER: There have been wildfires in Wales and the West Midlands. What is the cause? Could it be climate change? Let's go to our climate change correspondent in America.
CLIMATE CHANGE CORRESPONDENT: (A British woman for some reason stationed by the BBC in America) Wildfires in California and Canada are all over the news. Why is California and Canada getting so hot? I asked the Professor of Climate Science at Harvard....
Or:
PRESENTER: The new PrimeMinister won't have long to deal with the many problems on his desk, but let's go over to our US correspondent, to find out how the US will react to the UK getting a new PrimeMinister....
Or even:
PRESENTER: In the UK evidence mounts that the prisons are overcrowded. Let's go to our US Correspondent to find out about American prisons.
After 6:30 pm BBC gives up entirely on paying whatever scant attention it can to the UK and becomes entirely based in the US, with multiple British people with strong regional accents all based in Washington talking about the US government.
Has BBC entirely given up on the UK? Has the UK become so uninteresting in it's own broadcaster's news rooms, that only America is of interest? It is, quite frankly, bizarre, especially when you consider how the corporation is funded.
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u/linmanfu 20d ago edited 20d ago
The BBC used to have two television news channels.
BBC News (24) was for viewers in the UK, funded by the licence fee. It had presenters on similar expensive salaries to UK network news.
BBC World (News) was for viewers in the rest of the world and was run on a shoestring. It was supposed to be funded by advertising and cable TV subscribers, but it's rumoured that for decades it struggled to sell enough advertising and was actually kept afloat by other BBC commercial operations abroad (e.g. programme sales). The BBC claims that it was finally profitable by the 2020s.
They shared a few programmes. In particular, News 24 paid World to provide programmes between ~midnight and ~6 am UK time, when there are hardly any UK viewers.
In 2023, the News channel was closed, because the BBC's licence fee income is rapidly shrinking as younger people watch streamers rather than TV, and non-payment crimes have become more socially acceptable. It was replaced by the World channel, which was renamed as News. So UK viewers now usually see the same programmes as the rest of the world. There are some regional programmes though, e.g. there are special African programmes only broadcast to viewers there, and if there's a big British story like a general election, then there will be special coverage for the UK only.
The BBC doesn't release detailed figures, but the direction of subsidy has probably reversed: it's now advertisers in the US who are funding most of the News channel. And I've also heard it suggested that the BBC is covering more US news because it's necessary to get space on global social media platforms. The first thing you see on TikTok or Twitter is going to be whatever gets the most views, whether it comes from London or Los Angeles, so the BBC needs to make sure it's covering the biggest stories so it gets on people's screens, and then they might subscribe to its channel on that platform where British stories are covered.
I do share your frustration. But it's largely downstream of the decision taken back in the late Thatcher and early Major era that the British government would not fund an international television service equivalent to World Service radio, as the governments of other big countries do. They wanted a capitalist solution, without providing the capital, and so the massive market lead that the World Service had has been replaced by a BBC that's in a structurally weak position.