Times change. The media world changes. And yes, we must all change with it.
But if more and more people get their news and comment from YouTube and TikTok, does that mean there is no longer a need – or an appetite – for long-form radio programmes which can examine ideas, spot trends and take a step back from the hurly-burly?
All of which is to say that I deeply regret the BBC’s decision to kill off the BBC Radio 4 programme The World Tonight, which I presented for twenty-three years. And judging by the responses to the announcement on social media, so do many of its devoted listeners, ranging all the way from Simon Schama to Gyles Brandreth.
Yes, the BBC has to save money (thank you, successive mean-minded Tory governments, which have consistently refused to set a licence fee commensurate with the BBC’s needs). Yes, it means making horribly difficult decisions and upsetting loyal listeners and viewers. And yes, of course, the BBC must adapt to the new media landscape.
Making a radio news programme costs a fraction of what it costs to make its TV equivalent. Axing a programme like The World Tonight will save pennies, not pounds, but the cost to disappointed listeners will be far, far greater. And I do question whether the BBC can afford to alienate its loyal base at a time when it is being challenged as never before by the billionaire titans of the online world.
Under a succession of imaginative, forward-thinking editors, The World Tonight has taken listeners to places other programmes were tempted to ignore. In my time on the programme, I presented editions from every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica: Australia, which hosted a difficult Commonwealth summit in the aftermath of 9/11; Japan, as it tried to shake off decades of economic stagnation; Brazil as it experimented with prioritising economic growth at the same time as protecting the environment and Kabul in 2002, as Afghanistan emerged from the terrors of Taliban rule and the US-led invasion that followed 9/11.
And surely no other programme, on the day that the US inaugurated its first Black president in January 2009, would have sent its presenter not to Washington DC but to Birmingham, Alabama, the heart of what had been the segregationist deep South, to hear from both white people and black people on a day that history was made.
There is a real danger that the tyranny of the click-bait mindset among BBC news managers will mean no more globally-focused reporting and analysis from countries that rarely figure in the headlines but where there are important developments beneath the surface. How many clicks on YouTube would a report from Mali get, for example, even if it shone a spotlight on that country’s dangerous Islamist insurgency linked to al-Qaeda?
Of course, it will always be easier to axe programmes like The World Tonight than any number of reality TV shows that go viral on social media. But if the BBC is to earn its place in the rapidly changing media environment, it must be able to offer something that no other provider does. Focusing on delivery mechanisms at the expense of content is the path to irrelevance.
And if it is true, as it most certainly is, that the modern world is more inter-connected than ever before, how can it possibly make sense to reduce the BBC’s capacity to produce internationally-focused reporting geared specifically for UK listeners, who, after all, are the people paying for it?
As from next April, unless BBC bosses have a change of heart, Radio 4 listeners will have the opportunity at 10pm on weekday evenings to hear the World Service programme Newshour, which will be simulcast on both networks. It happens to be an exceptionally good programme, which I know as well as I know The World Tonight, as I presented both programmes throughout my time at the BBC.
But it is made for a different audience with different interests and different needs. Listeners in Lagos or Lahore will not be as fascinated, for example, by the result of the Makerfield by-election as listeners in Liverpool or Leeds – and rightly so. Imagine the surprise of a Radio 4 listener on the day Sir Keir Starmer leaves Downing Street to hear a news programme that leads on a new five-year plan announced by the Chinese Communist Party.
So yes, I am sad. Sad because of what The World Tonight meant to me over more than two decades, and, more importantly, sad for Radio 4 listeners who will lose a programme made specifically to bring the outside world to their bedside or bathside at the end of yet another frenetic, news-saturated day.
Robin Lustig presented The World Tonight between 1989 and 2012. He is the author of a recently published family history memoir: “And The Cello Came Too”.
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