Losing BBC Newsnight’s investigation arm is bad decision

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. The BBC has announced swingeing cuts to Newsnight, one of its flagship current affairs programmes, getting rid of many of its dedicated reporters and cutting it down to a debate programme lasting 30 minutes. The corporation proposes to replace Newsnight’s investigative functions with a beefed-up investigations unit. It expects the changes to trim £7.5mn as part of its plan to reduce spending by £500mn.

I have my own vested interest here, as a regular panellist on Newsnight debates, and therefore one of the big “winners” from these plans. But the plans have major implications for how the BBC operates, and are in my view an accident waiting to happen. Some thoughts on that below.

Linear regression

Nearly three-quarters of UK adults get their news via the BBC, whether on linear television, BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds, BBC radio or the BBC website. When you consider that at least some of the UK adults who say they get their news exclusively via Facebook, TikTok or some other new media platform are in fact getting their news via the BBC’s presence on those channels, that number is higher still.

In an era in which decreasing numbers of Britons go to church, join political parties or participate in other shared activities, the BBC’s reach makes it, among other things, a vital nation-building tool. But whoever wins the next election is going to have to grapple with updating the corporation’s funding model, as the number of licence fee-payers shrinks.

(Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, who is far and away the most likely person to end up having to deal with this issue, is not wedded to a particular solution or mechanism, but does recognise the BBC’s unique role in British public life and the UK’s media ecosystem.)

The broadcaster’s dominance is part of why politicians of all stripes will want to preserve it, as a vital way of preserving the UK’s national culture and an instrument of its soft power. But that is also why turning Newsnight into a simple discussion programme is a bad decision.

The BBC has a lot of strengths, but it also has a pronounced monoculture. What the political editor tweets to a specialised political audience of an evening shapes what people hear over their cornflakes on Radio 2 or Radio 3.

Newsnight — which one of its previous editors once described to me as being “an autonomous republic” within the BBC — is a useful safety valve against that. Its award-winning Grenfell reports set out what happened on the night of the Grenfell tower fire but it also exposed mistakes in the BBC’s coverage of the tragedy. Newsnight’s coverage of bullying and harassment in parliament, and its coverage of the allegations against John Bercow in particular, took place in the face of a BBC news desk that was reluctant to own the story itself — to the point that a plan to put the story online at 5pm, before Newsnight aired, was abandoned because the news desk did not want to take responsibility for the story.

BBC staff were angered when Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, cited Hannah Barnes’ investigation into the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic as a proof point that the BBC’s investigations were in good health and would thrive without Newsnight, because it is well known in the BBC that Esme Wren, the programme’s then-producer, had to “fight tooth and nail”, in the words of one staffer, to get the story on the air. And it was Newsnight that reported on problems within Kids Company, although the BBC’s then-creative director, Alan Yentob, was also the chair of trustees at the charity.

I’m not saying that the current affairs programme has always been right and the BBC always wrong: many Inside Politics readers will have objections to its coverage on this and other issues. But what I am saying is that when you have an organisation that has such a large role in shaping what news the population sees, it needs an organisation that provides some form of internal challenge and accountability.

Without it, the chances are high that the next Kids Company-style scandal is uncovered not by the BBC but by its commercial rivals — and that will make the BBC’s dominance of the UK media ecosystem hard to defend even if there is a pro-corporation government in charge.

Now try this

I’m very grateful to the various music recommendations that come my way via Inside Politics readers. Today’s, however, comes from Adrian Salmon, who is one of the subs who very kindly works on Inside Politics: Steely Dan’s wonderful 1977 record Aja. It really is a fantastic bit of jazz. I’m not sure I could pick a favourite track. Perhaps I Got The News, but that might be just because it’s playing as I type. I’ve added the full record to our Spotify playlist, where you can hear essentially every piece of music I’ve recommended in this newsletter and a couple of pieces I meant to highlight and then forgot about.

Top stories today

• Hushed down | The UK unemployment rate fell to 3.5 per cent in the spring, according to early findings from a new survey from the Office for National Statistics that suggests the jobs market is stronger than previously thought.

• Calls to scrutinise Telegraph deal | More than a dozen Conservative MPs have urged the deputy prime minister to use the UK’s national security powers to scrutinise the proposed takeover of the Telegraph by Abu Dhabi-backed RedBird IMI ahead of an expected regulatory intervention today.

• ‘All but dried up’ | Under 2 per cent of people who have entered the UK by small boat since 2018 have been removed to another country, underscoring Rishi Sunak’s failure to deliver on his promise to tackle a large backlog in asylum claims. 

• Starmer’s Gaza stance weighs on Muslim vote | Labour hopes to flip dozens of Tory seats in the general election expected next year but the loss of Muslim voters could splinter the broad coalition of support it needs to attract to win.

• Notts unable to deliver balanced budget | Nottingham City Council has declared itself effectively bankrupt, meaning it will stop all spending other than on services it must provide by law, the BBC reports. A recent report said the Labour-run council was set for a £23mn overspend in the 2023-24 financial year.