The former BBC director general John Birt has criticised the corporation’s current affairs output, which includes Panorama, saying it is not doing enough to address “awesomely difficult questions” about issues including Europe, the UK economy and the threat from radical Islam.
Birt, who brought his “mission to explain” approach to current affairs from LWT when he joined the BBC as deputy director general and director of news in 1987, said the BBC’s on-air current affairs presence had been progressively dismantled.
In order to restore its effectiveness, he called on James Harding, director of BBC news and current affairs, to be willing to “take on battles with other people in the BBC”.
However, Birt said the major part of Harding’s BBC News division, the day-to-day news operation, was “in really good shape; as good as it’s ever been”.
He said the corporation had to “redefine” its role in a digital era that had seen an explosion of information but a deficit of analysis and explanation. “You do have to fight for airtime and the right kind of resources,” Birt told a conference on the future of the BBC at London’s City University on Thursday.
“While I think news is in excellent shape, I think James faces a challenge on current affairs. What it’s not sufficiently doing is addressing the very big awesomely difficult questions our country and our world are facing at the moment.
“The BBC needs to be equipped in every way, including with airtime in order to be able to address these questions.”
Birt, who flagged up the importance of the BBC’s role in the event of a referendum on Europe in 2017, said: “Channel controllers will say ‘I don’t want big, weighty programmes’ … They will always resist that.”
He added that the BBC as whole needed to “redefine [itself], get back to those very high purposes which are appropriate to a publicly funded broadcaster”.
Asked about BBC2’s Newsnight, Birt said the more in-depth current affairs analysis he was calling for was not the remit of the Evan Davis-presented programme, which he said was a “programme of the day, about issues of the moment”.
“I am talking about a much more strategic need on all the big questions we face,” he said. “Every economy bar one in the G7 is more productive than the UK – these are the big issues that go undiscussed.”
But Birt declined to talk about BBC1’s Panorama, which faces an uncertain future and was criticised in a BBC Trust report earlier this year.
“I am not going to make James’s life a misery by going through his team of players,” he said. “If you take current affairs as a whole it doesn’t have sufficient presence at the moment. I am not alone in thinking that.”
Birt said new technology and digital platforms meant everyone had more information than ever before. “What it is not creating is more quality journalism,” he said.
“We get more knowledge of things happening around the world but pulling it altogether and addressing the big policy questions – what should we be doing in respect of radical Islam, the National Health Service – that’s what we’re not doing very well and nobody’s doing very much.”
Cumnock Media Class
