The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been the icon of national and international news since its founding in 1922, ninety-eight years ago. It was and has been one of the most trusted news networks for the world-wide audience. Employing over thirty-five thousand employees including part-time and wage workers it is the largest and oldest public service broadcaster in the world. But as of recently, the ratings of the BBC have been falling in its domestic areas.
According to a new report by Ofcom, the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications, and postal industries of the United Kingdom have found that although that most audiences believe that the BBC news is accurate and trustworthy, they gave a low score when it came to the BBC being an impartial source of news. According to Ofcom’s BBC performance tracker, only fifty-four percent of UK adults agree that the BBC provides impartial news. In an increasingly polarizing world, this news comes a hard blow to the company as it sees itself as an impartial source of news.
The research also showed that depending on their political persuasion, audiences saw the BBC as too right-wing or too left-wing. Studies of social media showed that the strongest political views were the most likely to make critical comments about the BBC. These results make the BBC the lowest-ranked channel in the UK when compared with Sky, ITV/STV, Channel 5, and Channel 4. Although the report does not find a breach in the impartiality code, it remains one of the most complained about themes of this year.
On further analysis of the report, it was found that respondents stated that their views were influenced by the BBC brand, its funding mechanism, and its portrayal across wider media. Since 2017, while there has been a decrease in the proportion of regular users of BBC TV and ITV for news who believe that these providers’ news is impartial the opposite was observed for Sky News channel and Channel 4; their regular news viewers were able to return increased scores for perceptions of impartiality during this time. To take corrective action at the BBC, it stated in its annual report that it had introduced revised impartiality training for journalists and was producing additional impartiality guidance for those reporting on news and current affairs.
