Governors’ review
of services – News


Overview 

BBC News output across television, radio and online has 
remained strong and confident, with notable responses to 
breaking stories and set-piece events at home and abroad, 
and some fine pieces of investigative reporting. 

However, the ways audiences use BBC News, and their 
expectations of the services provided, are changing rapidly 
and we are encouraged by the division’s moves during 
the year to understand these changes fully so that it can 
respond appropriately through its Creative Future work. 
The move to place News 24 at the heart of the BBC 
television news operation is already paying dividends. 

The impartiality and editorial independence of the BBC 
is something that licence fee payers feel very strongly 
about, as they made clear to us on many occasions in our 
accountability work during the year.We are encouraged 
by BBC News’ continuing drive to ensure its journalists 
adhere to the highest standards of impartiality, accuracy 
and independence.We have continued our own series 
of independent reviews of coverage of particularly 
contentious issues (see pages 18 to 19) and plan, with 
management, to carry out a major study in this area 
in 2006/2007 to ensure that the BBC’s impartiality and 
independence are not threatened by some of the new 
developments made possible by the digital revolution. 

46 BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2005/2006 

One Day in Iraq 

Providing context: One Day in Iraq went behind 
the daily headlines and used television, radio and 
online to bring alive the events of a single day as 
seen through the eyes of people living in Iraq 


Remit 
BBC News aspires to be the world’s 
most trusted news organisation: 
accurate, impartial and independent. 
It aims to be truthful and fair, offering 
journalism that explores multiple 
viewpoints and gives voice to a wide 
range of opinions in order to serve all 
audiences. BBC News seeks to act in 
the public interest and to resist pressure 
from political parties, lobby groups and 
commercial interests. 

Overall audiences to BBC News have 
fallen somewhat, although the picture 
varies sharply between media. In very 
broad terms, audiences for traditional 
BBC television news bulletins and current 
affairs programmes are falling, although 
audiences to BBC News 24 are growing; 
audiences for online and on-demand news 
continue to surge, and audiences for BBC 
radio news remain strong. 

Taking all its output together across 
television, radio and online, BBC News 
recorded a claimed weekly reach in 
2005/2006 of 79% of the UK adult 
population aged 15+ (81% in 2004/2005); 
79% represents 40.5 million adults. 
Claimed weekly reach reflects the 
number of respondents who recall 
having seen/heard/used BBC News in 
the previous week. 

Average weekly 15-minute reach for 
BBC News (network services only, ie 
not nations and regions services) was: 

 Television – BBC One’s four main 
news programmes: 49.1% (50.6% 
Panorama Special – Undercover Nurse 

Investigating abuse: Margaret Haywood, 
a state-registered nurse, went undercover for 
Panorama to investigate complaints from patients 
about conditions on an acute medical ward in 
a failing hospital 

in 2004/2005); 49.1% is equivalent 

to 22.9 million adults 

 Television – BBC News 24: 8.6% in multichannel homes (7.8% in 2004/2005); 
8.6% is equivalent to 2.8 million adults 
 Radio – 47.6% (47.5% in 2004/2005); 
47.6% is equivalent to 23.5 million adults 
 Online – 15% of the population 
(9% in 2004/2005); 15% is equivalent 
to 8.6 million individuals aged 4+ 
In news terms the year will be 
remembered for two stories in particular: 
the suicide bombs in London, and 
Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf coast of the 
US. Overall, BBC News responded well 
across television, radio and online – both 
to the initial events and to the subsequent 
political and social aftermath.The BBC 
Ten O’Clock News was awarded the Bafta 
for Best News Coverage for its reporting 
of the 7 July events.The suicide bombings 
sparked an editorial debate over the 
BBC’s use of the word ‘terrorist’ (see 
Governors’ review of objectives, page 18). 
There was strong coverage too of other 
major events, including the death of Pope 
John Paul II, a devastating earthquake in 
Pakistan and Kashmir, and the election of 
new leaders by the Conservatives and the 
Liberal Democrats. 

Of the set-piece events, coverage of the 
General Election stands out. For the first 
time a special edition of Question Time 
brought the three main party leaders 
face-to-face with a studio audience in 
the same programme. Jeremy Paxman’s 
leader interviews successfully brought his 
challenging style to BBC One. BBC News 
used the General Election to pilot a new 
system of measuring the audience impact 
of BBC journalism in terms of promoting 
informed citizenship. It found that 85% of 

40.5 

million


adults accessed BBC News across BBC 
television, radio and online in 2005/2006 

respondents agreed that “watching, 
listening to or reading news and current 
affairs from the BBC enables me to 
become better informed about current 
events and issues facing the country”. 
The coverage drew strong public backing 
for its fairness and impartiality. 

BBC Television News faced a difficult 
editorial decision in reporting the 
widespread protests by Muslims that 
followed the decision of a Danish 
newspaper to print cartoons depicting 
the Prophet Muhammad.The question 
was whether or not to show the cartoons. 
On the one hand: could the story be told 
properly without doing so? On the other: 
would showing the cartoons not risk 
causing grave offence to some viewers? 
In the event, news bulletins used a brief 
sequence of moving pictures of a French 
newspaper that had reprinted the 
cartoons in order to give some idea of 
the context in which the cartoons were 
published without dwelling on them 
gratuitously, and bbc.co.uk/news did 
not show the cartoons, although it did 
provide links to newspaper websites that 
had published them. 

These decisions provoked many complaints 
from a number of different viewpoints. 
Some criticised the BBC for not showing 
the cartoons in full. Others criticised the 
BBC for showing any part of them. Others 
attacked the BBC for – in their view – 
showing more concern about the 
sensitivities of Muslims to the portrayal 
of Muhammad than had been shown to 
Christians over the portrayal of Christ in 
Jerry Springer – the Opera.We received a 
report on the coverage from the Director-
General at our Board meeting in February. 
Because this is a matter which could 
come before the Governors’ Programme 
Complaints Committee, we did not express 
a view on the central issues. 

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2005/2006 47 

Governors’ review 
of services – News


Although audience appetite for traditional 
current affairs television programmes 
appears to be diminishing, this is still a genre 
that can deliver impact both editorially and 
with audiences. On BBC Two, Children of 
Beslan was a moving and sober re-creation 
of the school massacre in North Ossetia as 
recalled by the young survivors one year on 

– it drew the highest appreciation score of 
any BBC programme that month and has 
since won a number of awards. Panorama 
Special – Undercover Nurse revealed 
disturbing failings in the treatment of elderly 
patients in an acute ward of an NHS 
hospital in Sussex.The programme, which 
provoked widespread press follow-up, was 
watched by 4.6 million people and drew the 
highest audience appreciation score ever 
achieved by an edition of Panorama. When 
Satan Came to Town, an edition of Real Story 
that investigated wrongful allegations of 
satanic abuse of children in Rochdale, drew 
extensive press attention. In order 
to mount this salutary and important 
investigation the BBC had to fight a legal 
battle to have a longstanding gagging 
injunction lifted. In Facing the Truth on BBC 
Two, Archbishop Desmond Tutu brought 
face-to-face victims and perpetrators of 
Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence.This 
BBC Northern Ireland series caused some 
controversy – before filming began, a 
number of organisations representing victims 
and survivors expressed reservations over 
the wisdom of the enterprise. Archbishop 
Tutu met them privately to discuss their 
concerns before the programmes were 
recorded. In the event, this series, moving 
and painful by turns, was achieved with 
admirable integrity, sensitivity and care for 
the participants. 
On Radio 4, the consistent excellence of 
the Six O’Clock News – authoritative, broad-
ranging, dispassionate, concise and well 
crafted, and for many years the gold standard 
for radio news bulletins – was recognised 


User-generated content 

Finding fresh sources of news: when the Buncefield 
oil storage depot went up in flames viewers sent in 
many images taken on mobile phones – some were 
used in BBC News output 

with a Sony Gold Award.Edward Stourton’s 
series A Year in the Arab-Israeli Crisis provided 
compelling insight into the day-to-day 
management of events in the Middle East, 
based on extensive contact with Israeli 
and Palestinian cabinet ministers, diplomats 
and advisers. Other Radio 4 current affairs 
highlights included a strong series, Koran and 
Country, exploring the contemporary impact 
of Islam; and Frank Gardner’s Analysis Special 

– How Islam got political, a thoughtful 
exploration of the roots of the radicalisation 
of some British Muslims. 
One Day in Iraq was an innovative attempt, 
led by the News Interactive team, to get 
behind the headlines of a long-running story 
using the combined resources of online, 
radio and television to report the events 
of a single day – 7 June 2005 – through the 
eyes of people living in Iraq. Online, there 
were diaries from a wide range of people 
including a medical student in Basra, a water 
engineer in Baghdad and a British contractor 
in Mosul, as well as selections from Iraqi 
newspapers and weblogs. Radio Five Live 
broadcast audio diaries from Iraq, and BBC 
News 24 also included coverage. From 
these widely varied fragments an illuminating 
picture of daily life in Iraq was constructed – 
a worthwhile project that added colour 
and texture to the daily reporting of this 
important story.The experiment has since 
been successfully repeated and a similar 
exercise carried out from Afghanistan. 

One potentially significant development 
during the year was the rapid growth in 
news material supplied by viewers and 
listeners – so-called “user-generated 
content”.The development is largely a 
by-product of mobile phone technology, 
enabling audiences to alert the BBC to news 
events by text message, and increasingly to 
supply images and video clips from mobile 
phone cameras too.The rapidly increasing 
scale of the phenomenon can be seen from 

976 

million


page impressions to bbc.co.uk/news in 
July 2005 

the statistics: in July the London suicide 
bombs produced about a thousand images 
and clips emailed in by members of the 
public on the day of the attack; in 
December, the huge fire at the Buncefield 
oil storage depot outside London produced 
five times that number by lunchtime alone. 

User-generated content and “citizen 
journalism” are valuable both as a source 
of material and as a way of demystifying 
the processes by which news is produced. 
But they also pose potentially significant 
ethical problems.Verification is an obvious 
issue and, beyond that, impartiality. BBC 
News is right to embrace user-generated 
content both as a new and valuable source 
of material and as a way of opening up its 
processes to its audiences.The challenge 
is to build robust editorial frameworks to 
ensure that while maximum editorial value 
is delivered back to licence fee payers 
from these contributions, BBC journalism’s 
core values of impartiality, accuracy and 
independence are not put at risk.There 
are also important health and safety issues 
to be considered – the BBC should not 
encourage untrained people to take 
unnecessary risks to provide material 
for its news bulletins. 

BBC News faces some big challenges. 
Although it remains editorially strong it will 
have to work hard to keep up with 
changing audience expectations – in 
particular the sharply growing appetite for 
on-demand news, delivered to audiences 
when and how they want. It will also have 
to develop new formats to enable it to 
reach audiences it now finds hard to 
connect with – the young, those in digital 
homes, and those in lower socio-economic 
groups. And it will have to make progress 
on these fronts without losing its grip on 
its core editorial values.These are issues 
that BBC News has begun to grapple with 
through its Creative Future work. 

48 BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2005/2006 

The London bombs on BBC News 24 

Delivering breaking news: BBC News 24’s coverage 
of the London bombings in July.The channel 
won the Royal Television Society’s award for News 
Channel of the Year 


Remit 
BBC News 24 aims to deliver news, 
analysis and insight, supported by the 
BBC’s newsgathering operations across 
the UK and around the world, all day, 
every day of the year. It sets out to 
provide fast, comprehensive coverage of 
events as they unfold – locally, nationally 
and internationally – and specialist analysis 
to put the news in context. 

BBC News 24 has continued to make 
good progress, reflecting changes made by 
management to place the channel at the 
centre of BBC News’ television operations. 
We are encouraged by the continued 
increase in audience reach. In 2005/2006, 
average weekly 15-minute reach to viewers 
aged 4+ in multichannel homes was 7.4% 
or 3.1 million people (6.7%/2.5 million in 
2004/2005)1.We are also encouraged by 
the channel’s growing reputation among 
opinion formers. News 24’s editorial 
achievements have been recognised by the 
Royal Television Society’s award of News 
Channel of the Year – a first for News 24. 

The channel responded well to the year’s 
big breaking stories. Its coverage of the 
earthquake in Pakistan and Kashmir 
included a commendable emphasis on 
reflecting the experience of families in 
the UK affected by the disaster. 

Our view remains that the distinctiveness 
of the channel must rest on an agenda that 
is more analytical, more international and 
more diverse than that of its competitors, 
and which gives a higher priority to 
compelling and serious journalism. 
With this in mind, we were pleased to 

Average audience for network news bulletins 2005/2006 (millions) 

Source: BARB,TNS/Infosys, age 4+ 

note management’s commitment in the 
Statements of Programme Policy to feature 
more international news coverage than 
Sky News, and to feature more local and 
regional news by giving regional perspectives 
to national stories. Performance against 
these commitments will be measured by 
periodic analyses of News 24’s output 
by independent experts. 

One issue coming to the fore in News 24 
is how far the channel is justified in carrying 
unconfirmed reports.The question is 
whether the BBC’s traditional caution 
in this area is entirely appropriate for a 
continuous news channel where, in the 
early stages of many breaking stories, it 
may be a more accurate reflection of 
reality to report uncertainty and competing 
explanations of events rather than stick 
with a single – usually official – version 
of events unless and until it is definitively 
proved wrong. 

There is some evidence that audiences 
approach continuous news differently from 
the way they view set-piece bulletins. From 
bulletins they expect – particularly from 
the BBC – a steadfast adherence to the 
facts and do not lightly forgive inaccuracy. 
However, with continuous news, audiences 
seem to be more willing to accept that 
reporting an unfolding story, especially in its 
early stages, is likely to involve some degree 
of uncertainty.This debate has raised very 
important issues and we will monitor 
developments closely.The BBC’s reputation 
for accuracy ought not to be put at risk – 
but, equally, audience expectations should 
be fully taken into account. 

For our report on bbc.co.uk/news see 
page 45. 

1The number of individuals in multichannel homes 

grew by 5 million to 42.5 million between 

2004/2005 and 2005/2006 

BBC One O’Clock News 2.7 2.7 

ITV1 lunchtime news 1.2 1.4 

BBC Six O’Clock News 4.5 4.8
ITV1 early evening news 4.1 4.3


BBC Ten O’Clock News 4.6 4.8


ITV1 nightly news 2.7 2.8 

2005/ 2004/ 
2006 2005 


Remit 
BBC Parliament is the only UK channel 
dedicated to the coverage of politics. 
Debates from both Houses at Westminster, 
the work of the devolved parliamentary 
chambers of the UK, and some Select 
Committee hearings are broadcast 
uninterrupted.The channel also covers 
the work of the European Parliament. 

BBC Parliament has extended its valuable 
work. For the first time the channel 
covered the Scottish Parliament live and 
two further broadband streams were 
added for live coverage of the House of 
Lords, Commons debates in Westminster 
Hall, and Select Committees. 

For some years we have been pressing for 
an improvement in the viewing experience 
on Freeview where the quarter-screen 
view is unsatisfactory.We are glad to 
note management’s determination in the 
Statements of Programme Policy to improve 
matters during the coming year. 

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2005/2006 49