The BBC used to be impartial and critical of government cock ups. But now we've got a government who do nothing but cock ups, they've threatened them into toeing the line and they've, at least on the news programs, become a government mouthpiece.
Brexit destroyed them. They tried so hard to keep both sides happy they lost both.
I think the issue was that ‘impartial’ became - ‘we must be seen to be impartial and get 2 people of opposing sides to speak about everything’.
Even if one view was agreed by a large majority (say 80+%), they had to show another person with a differing generally diametrically opposite view.
so they did that because they were getting flak for not showing differing (albeit minority) views, and then they got flak for catering for minority (opinion) views and giving them airtime.
damned if they did, damned if they didn’t.
…and somewhere within all that the ‘news’ lost the ability to just present impartial factsand became a useless talking heads soundbite driven ‘balanced’ viewpoints fact-lite pandering to the celebrity/15 minutes of fame style news … it generates eyeballs/clicks, but isn’t ‘news’.
why you need to ‘go live’ to a reporter (and camera man, and sound man, and runner and producer etc) to generally repeat/rehash exactly what was said in the studio before going to ‘our man at the scene’… I don’t know. If it was , say, a developing situation eg a war report, then that makes sense, but most of the time it’s a rehash of the initial spiel from the studio , or with some random who adds diddly to a factual story that could have been presented and articulated far better and quicker (giving more time to more news stories to be presented) by the studio presenter.
I stopped watching the news when it became talking head/interview on street driven - it became opinion led , rather than factual led.
/rant off