The Today programme is not in crisis
When I joined BBC Radio 4’s Today programme some 14 months ago, my friend Ian Katz, then editor of Newsnight, took me to lunch. I spoke of the enormous privilege of editing this news institution. He smiled kindly and said I could look forward to buckets of manure being emptied over the programme. In fact I enjoyed a honeymoon period, with a depressingly eventful summer encouraging a large audience for news.
Now the landscape has changed: for more than a year, there has been one dominating story – Brexit – that does not advance in a linear fashion. The country is polarised and people respond in different ways. Some seek endorsement of their own views, from polemical rather than impartial news presenters. They listen to shock jocks. Others have turned off the news altogether; perhaps it’s not surprising that Radio 3’s listeners are up.
As the political debate intensifies, more people now seem to regard as intolerable any discussion of views they do not hold. Any interviews with Brexiteers are evidence that the BBC has shifted to the Right (and naturally we get it in the neck from the Brexiteers for being patently in support of Remain). We invite on a wide variety of figures to interrogate their views; a social media savvy section of the public believe that representation is endorsement. In a three-hour show it is easy to listen only to a part of the programme, hear one view, and take that as unchallenged.
I should say it is salutary for those of us who have made a life in journalism to see what it feels like to sit on the ducking stool. Accusations are repeated until they form a “narrative”. When things were quiet after that first, frantic summer, we looked at some non-political subjects in more depth: athletics, Silicon Valley, the multi-billionbut pound business of British fashion.
A former editor of the programme wrote that this signalled the end of serious news. Ever since, I have been the new woman editor who introduced soft features. I understand that this is a seductive narrative but it is contradicted by an alternative narrative, which is that the Today programme has become unrelenting in its news coverage.
Both are pressed into service of an easy story: “The Today programme is in crisis.” We’re not. Our audience is eight per cent down year on year, in line with the audience for news programmes generally. News programmes fluctuate according to the news.
A devoted, hard-working, modestly sized team of reporters, producers and presenters works flat out, on horrible rotas, to try to set up the day for some seven million listeners. We want to broaden our reach, which is why we have broadcast from universities across the country in the last year and why we are developing a podcast for a younger audience.
We try to disseminate news in an impartial way, to listeners who are as likely to read The Guardian as The Daily Telegraph. And we try not to take too seriously the level of personal abuse on social media.
News is a challenge for all of us, not least the newspaper industry, which wrestles with an alarming decline in sales. The issues could not be more important. We have seen in the political events of the last two years what happens when media fail to report all strands of opinion. The task for all of us is to try to keep people engaged.
Oh, and I have not changed my mind: it remains an enormous privilege to edit the Today programme. READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion