The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Birt Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, journalism takes many forms, but its solemn democratic roles are to investigate and surface hidden matters of consequence, to inform public debate on critical issues and to hold to account people and organisations exercising power. Here’s the rub: the most valuable journalism—real journalism—requires expertise, time and money.

I spent my whole career as a journalist on the front line, as an editor or, latterly, as the supervising executive of the most powerful and respected news organisation in the whole world. In my early career, I was editor of two of ITV’s major current affairs programmes, “World in Action” and “Weekend World”. “World in Action” had a formidable record in investigative journalism, and we were not alone; we looked across in admiration at our colleagues on the Sunday Times Insight team lifting the lid on the thalidomide scandal and many other stories. “Weekend World” assembled the best policy minds to provide searching analysis of the major issues of the day: Peter Jay, then Brian Walden, then Matthew Parris courteously interrogated the leading politicians of the day about those issues, often for 30 to 45 minutes and often with highly revealing results. Which of today’s politicians could withstand that?

Later in my career, painstakingly skilful “Panorama” journalists, such as Peter Taylor and John Ware, carried the investigative baton revealing unpalatable truths, often about sensitive events in Northern Ireland. All these well-funded ventures had in common large, talented and dedicated teams, and the luxury of time. As a senior executive in ITV, I led a study that showed that, at the time, ITV spent more in total on its regional news and current affairs programmes than on all its network programmes.

At LWT we had a local current affairs programme, “The London Programme”, devoted only to London issues, on which young journalists such as Greg Dyke and the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, cut their teeth. Its signature achievement was to expose rampant corruption in the Met.

The network and local broadcast journalism of today is a shadow of the world that I once inhabited. The BBC has been brutally cut back and the consequence is particularly painful for me to witness. The finances of ITV and Channel 4 are manifestly challenged, as are those of our leading broadsheet papers. As a result, we no longer have a sufficiency of penetrating, original journalism about the whole slate of issues and challenges that beset us and the wider world so starkly. In place of a sufficiency of rational, civilised dialogue, we have bedlam—the jabs, insults and fakery of social media. There are no easy answers to these problems, but one course of action is clear: the Government must do all they can to reinvigorate not just the BBC but all our public service broadcasters. And we have to consider an uncomfortable option. We invest public money in public goods—science, academic research, the arts and culture, defence, health and education. It is time, I fear, to think of investing public money, with appropriate safeguards, in supporting democracy with journalism of quality at national and local level, in print, broadcast and online media. We need to act before it is too late.