The existential threat facing the BBC

Less impartial than Channel 5. That will be the headline generated by Ofcom’s latest annual report on the BBC. In fact, what the regulator’s research finds is that, over the last two years, the percentage of BBC viewers who deem the Corporation’s output ‘impartial’ has fallen from 61 to 58 per cent, while Channel 5 has driven up confidence in its impartiality from 57 to 61 per cent. Indeed, Auntie is still ‘the most-used news source in the UK’ and 70 per cent of regular viewers still say it is ‘accurate and trustworthy’. Nor does Ofcom find the Corporation’s news service breached the Broadcasting Code’s requirements for due impartiality or due accuracy in 2019-20.

Despite this, separate research shows just 54 per cent of us view the news we get from the BBC as impartial. Ofcom puts this down to ‘an increasingly polarised political and cultural landscape’ and notes research showing a correlation between strong partisanship and a perception of BBC bias.