This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Kay Burley retired from Sky News in February, disappearing from the airwaves in the dead of winter to an almost eerie indifference. In her valedictory speech she boasted not of journalistic scoops, merely of a stubborn endurance: “More hours of live TV than anyone in history.”
In 2025, such a boast seems a rather strange claim to fame, one of those herculean yet irrelevant curios more at home in the Guinness Book of Records than the annals of statesmanship once reserved for public service broadcasting.
Burley was escaping a sinking ship. At least this was the charge by her rival Camilla Tominey at the now-resurgent GB News. Last year Adam Boulton called for the channel to be banned by Ofcom to preserve “the delicate broadcast ecology in this country”.
But Boulton’s former home, Sky News, is now a better bet for a widely-anticipated event: the first major news channel to switch itself off in 21st century. Come 2028, funding commitments by their owners Comcast are set to expire, leading to a dash to transition from free-to-air to monetising “premium digital content” behind a paywall. The question now is not who gets allowed into Boulton’s precious sanctuary, but whether it will even survive in its current form.
At the start of the century, eight in ten trusted the BBC, Sky and ITN on the issues of the day. In recent years the numbers have plummeted to less than half. Britain’s big broadcasters have come to preside over a media landscape that has some of the lowest levels of trust and highest of avoidance in the world.
Last year, more people got their news online, with the younger generations now almost shunning TV entirely. Efforts to cultivate a new generation of listeners to the Today programme seem almost futile. The BBC’s charter expires in two years, with YouGov polls reporting just three in ten people believe it offers good value for money.
The old broadcasters now find themselves adrift in a radically different 21st century with very little influence or control. When Elon Musk weighed into the grooming gangs scandal — reignited by a piece Sam Bidwell wrote for The Critic — at the start of the year, he gave a flavour of the new volatility across Britain’s information landscape and the energies it might unfurl.
For two weeks, the nation’s media lost not just control of the narrative, but the guardrails that accompany the growing set of stories that lay bare the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of the state itself. Untethered from the drab routine of the news media, today’s stories of dysfunction are increasingly swept up towards the broader political realignment now threatening Britain’s old establishment.
The TV industry may no longer be able to comprehend the new irate, polarised Britain
To speak to those working in the industry today is to get an acute sense that it is no longer able to comprehend the new Britain. The country is irate and polarised, and familiar TV journalists are tainted by their proximity to the endless cycle of Westminster dysfunction, institutional decline and pointless sofa debates. The country’s news media: from its endless soundbites to slick screen performances feels like a relic belonging to a failed, exhausted era.
Tides of legal and illegal migration, crumbling public services, rising crime and localised civic collapse are the stories of the day: a beat almost alien to the sprawling cathedral Sky built to the age of rolling international news on the fringes of West London.
The energy is with the citizen journalist in its many guises: YouTube channels of middle-aged men walking through Britain’s run-down cities have more viewers than Newsnight. Seven in ten people now regard “news that represents them” as their guiding star in the digital age.
Come the next election, Reform’s insurgency may mirror Trump’s recent campaign in barely having to deal with Britain’s media establishment at all. Trump’s playbook upended all of the 20th century clichés around the media’s ability to set the day’s narrative. In the final weeks of the campaign, the press plane following Kamala Harris was half empty. Not one of her talking points from the election stuck: from the resilience of the US economy under Biden to the threat of Trump authoritarianism. This wasn’t just the triumph of the new media; it was the first post-media election.
“There is no plan,” said one former BBC editor, when I asked about how the industry might navigate this new world. The crisis he laid bare is twofold: one of relevancy but also competence when forced to work in the confines of a cumbersome 20th century bureaucracy. ”It’s journalism NPCs looking at the news wires and working out who we can get to speak on the topic to fill airtime,” he added. “All too often, the result is lazy and cheap — and surprise, surprise, people no longer regard it as a national treasure worth preserving.
The change in Sky News worries the entire industry because it poses a question no one really knows the answer to: how can you monetise broadcast news? When CNN tried to paywall premium content three years ago, it failed. Converting mass media to expertise people are willing to pay for begs another tricky question: what is so good about the BBC, ITN and Sky News?
Two years ago, the BBC settled on research that showed the public above all valued “transparency” about how news was made. BBC Verify was born. “Seeing is no longer believing,” said Deborah Turness announcing its launch, suggesting the corporation was tackling growing concern around audiences being deceived by AI and misinformation.
Yet Verify now seems a marketing gimmick to cover for two enduring criticisms of the BBC: ideological bias and waning competence.
A recent investigation by David Rose and Archie Earle found one in 20 stories had either been redacted or corrected, including sensitive pieces on last summer’s riots and a hospital attack in Gaza. Adjacent to this is the ongoing Buzzfeedication of its news site, flooded with clickbait rooted in outmoded viral algorithms, barely-edited press releases and stories pumped out by charities and NGOs.
“The entire industry now seems stuck in the procedures and assumptions of the 2010s whilst the world is moving on,” said one veteran editor at a rival broadcaster. The year 2020, a nadir of media trust amidst coverage of the pandemic and the George Floyd riots, now appears not just an anomaly of difficult events but the culmination of a wrong set of assumptions.
Serving the public interest has become rooted in a broader fight against populism, extremism and online misinformation, a shift that led broadcasters to uphold political fads, moralise the fight against fringe conspiracies and defend flawed institutions.
Issues they perceived as “populist” created a reactionary drive to micromanage debate. “It’s hard to defend the idea of impartial broadcasters when we showed how exposed we were to ideological trends,” said the veteran producer.
What stands out now are bizarre set-pieces indicative of an out-of-touch executive trying to grasp the moment: Sky’s The Climate Show, axed after poor ratings, forewent discussion of net-zero policy in place of gimmicks such as depicting Buckingham Palace under water whilst viewing issues such as the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan through the lens of global warming.
In a strange expansion of its remit, Sky News even partnered with the Cabinet Office’s Nudge Unit to produce a report arguing that broadcasters should try to change the “attitudes and behaviours of citizens” to make them more eco-friendly.
Madeleine Sumption’s quietly scathing review into the BBC’s coverage of immigration from 2023 is also indicative of the narrow ideological parameters that appear to be a relic of the era. The report found that coverage presented sceptical views on migration superficially whilst presenting labour migration as an “economic necessity” rather than a choice — two viewpoints that are now threatening to destroy Westminster’s two-party consensus.
Sky’s survival, like much of the industry, now depends on two things: moving beyond the 2010s to bring itself into the new age, whilst answering the question of how to market public service broadcasting in the digital age. Yet this itself strikes at an existential question that will require it to shed many of the self-sustaining myths that have now been rejected by the public.
The writer Conor Fitzgerald observed: “The kind of person who came to prosper in the media was a high-status dipshit: credentialled, technocratic, obsessed with social status and therefore intensely conformist.” The new will to survive by the old broadcasting establishment will need to be accompanied by an entire reformation in journalistic ethos, a shedding of the 20th century myths and its impulses to control the narrative and speak on behalf of the public. It must tune itself down to the grim and unforgiving mood of new Britain.
In the aftermath of the lost US election, a memo from CNN shown to the media outlet Semafor gave the verdict of the channel’s CEO Mark Thompson: “to succeed, we must abandon our preconception of the limits of what CNN can be and follow the audience to where they are now and where they will be in the years to come.” The tension now will be whether the industry will like where the public take them.
