Cuts to the BBC’s flagship evening news programme Newsnight have been described as “a bad decision” that reveals a “loss of confidence” at the corporation.
Newsnight staff past and present have reacted with dismay and anger at the axing of half of the programme’s staff by BBC, which will see the programme cut to 30 minutes and its headcount slashed from 57 to 23.
Emily Maitlis, who presented the show until last year, said she was worried that “extraordinary and exceptional journalism” would now be lost, and said the Prince Andrew interview she conducted would not happen under the new format.
“Of course there will still be interviews and debates and the theme music will carry on,” she wrote on X. “But once the bosses send out a signal they don’t really *care* about a flagship investigative news programme – the guests and the audience start to wonder why they should … ”
Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said: “ … the decision to totally eviscerate the ONLY serious daily tv news discussion show that BBC tv carries is just a flat out bad decision”, while Jane Martinson, professor of financial journalism at City, University of London said the cuts were a “sign the BBC has lost its confidence”.
The former Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes asked: “How will diversity of thought be preserved with just one central team?”, and a former policy editor, Lewis Goodall, said: “We need more of what Newsnight has always been about, not less.”
The Newsnight presenter Mark Urban wrote on X: “I have worked on the programme for 32 years, around the world, risking my life many times for its journalism. You can well imagine my feelings at cuts to our staff and budget of more than 50%.”
Defending the decision on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, BBC News CEO, Deborah Turness, said the impact of inflation and a flat licence fee meant that the BBC was facing a £500m funding hole, and news had to “carry its share”.
On Wednesday, the BBC announced that Newsnight would become an “interview, debate and discussion show”, lose its team of dedicated reporters and drop its investigative films to focus on studio-based debates.
Meanwhile, the media regulator Ofcom’s annual report into the BBC stated on Thursday that the broadcaster is having to make “difficult choices” as it moves to being a “digital first” organisation, but is “generally performing well in delivering its mission and public purposes”.
Research carried out by the regulator also found that working-class audiences think the BBC is “too dry and too serious”, with little representation on the BBC of “normal, working-class lives”. When they did see “people like them”, portrayals often were often stereotypical or “tokenist”, the study showed.
At the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference on Wednesday, acting BBC chair Dame Elan Closs Stephens said the broadcaster needed “focus and a determination” as it sought to make savings. “This has meant – and continues to mean – difficult choices, with implications for our services and of course for our audiences,” she said.
