How Important Is the BBC as a News Source?

One of the most persistent audience research findings over the years has been the tendency for most people, certainly in developed countries, to endorse TV as their main news source. By this is meant that in survey after survey, news audiences around the world have identified TV as their ‘most important’ news source, as the one they use the most, and as the one they trust the most and learn the most from. Breaking this response pattern down further, within the UK, the BBC has consistently emerged as people’s most preferred news source. The emergence of the Internet has, of course, changed the media ecology beyond recognition from the 1970s through 1990s when these most important news source questions were regularly featured in major public opinion surveys about the media. As earlier chapters showed, broadcast TV channels have experienced erosion of their audiences in the face of competition from Internet-based audio-visual services. The BBC has borne the brunt of this competition as well. Yet, as audience research evidence reviewed in this chapter shows, it has remained strong as a news provider and has continued to command the biggest and more loyal following of the multitude of news services with which it now finds itself in competition. Behavioural data have confirmed the BBC’s dominance over TV and radio and online. It is also still nominated as people’s most important and trusted news source when general comparisons are made on these criteria with other major news suppliers. All this evidence is reassuring for the Corporation and gives it valuable ammunition with which to defend its entitlement to public funding at the very least so that it can maintain its highly regarded news services. The one worrying blot on the horizon was emergent evidence that it was facing an uphill struggle—even with its news—to capture and hold the interest and patronage of young people.