The BBC is an institution in decline

The slump in listenership at the BBC Today programme, and its sister news and current affairs show on BBC Five Life fronted by Nicky Campbell, is becoming the media watchers’ favourite soap opera.

So, should we worry? The simple answer is yes, of course, because these programmes are run on public money and the Today programme prides itself on ‘setting the nation’s political agenda each day’ – a symptom of the general BBC smugness, which pervades Radio 4 in particular.

In one year, according to RAJAR, which measures such things, the Today programme has lost 839,000 audience, a slide from a high of about 7,820,000 to now around 6,981,000. Five Live Breakfast has dropped about 337,000.

The first official explanation from the BBC was that there had been ‘a quiet news agenda’ in the second quarter of this year compared with last, a time of a general election and the Brexit row. This explanation borders on the daft. This spring we had the Skripal affair, and the controversy over the chemical attack in Douma and Goutha, after which the UK joined the US and France in air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria.

Sarah Sands, the Today programme editor, gave her explanation in the Telegraph today. She writes that Brexit has changed everything, bringing a new toxicity, which makes it hard to give an adequate hearing to both sides of the argument, and leads to relentless accusations of bias against her presenters.

For Remainers and Brexiteers alike, the whole notion of basing coverage on balance rather than empirically derived truth seems to border on the plain barmy. Balance in the BBC’s rubric doesn’t mean objectivity and the debate has been dominated by the ranting of extremists, a dialogue of the deaf. Too often this leads to the endless round of parliamentary ping-pong from the likes of Ken Clarke, Heseltine, Adonis, Duncan Smith, Rees-Mogg, Frank Field, and Farage.

The malaise at the Today programme is one symptom of the problem – but an important one at that. I have known the programme from its early days with Jack Di Manio, through to Brian Redhead, John Timpson and beyond. I even presented it once for a month, not with conspicuous success. Best of all the presenters I knew was Robert Robinson, the brightest by far, and perhaps the funniest. He never pretended to be an expert in the subjects under scrutiny but always managed to ask the killer common sense question.

How different things are now. It has become the victim of the style of its presenters: knowing; a little smug; and addicted to editorializing in leading questions. Less and less is there the forensic investigation of news. Some interviewees just give up in despair – since unpacking the editorial misassumptions in many of the questions would take twice the time allotted to the interview itself.

Last month the former Danish prime minister Helle Henning-Schmidt felt forced to correct Justin Webb in a live interview about the humanitarian disaster in Yemen. She had just returned from the country on a mission with Save the Children. Webb insisted that most of the harm to the 22 million now needing aid was inflicted by the forces of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but Ms Henning-Schmidt had to stop him to insist that all sides have been committing atrocities, including the Houthi insurgents and their levies.

BBC journalism and values have been hit by a series of accidents and mishaps, some not entirely of the Corporation’s making. Take the disaster of the Savile affair, for example.

The poor treatment of the news on the BBC is certainly not symptomatic of a general rejection of news journalism. Sure, the newspapers are having a difficult time with a huge slide in advertising revenue, but news journalism can survive and thrive in the present climate – look at the resurgence of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the New Yorker.

The BBC is still the dominant player in British journalism, and most of it is good. Its website is one of the most powerful in world journalism. We get it free on delivery, but, of course yes, we the licence fee payers underwrite it – which gives a huge advantage over the newspaper websites.

And when it has this major competitive advantage, it should be better.