The slow, inexorable death of television news

Fred Skulthorp has an interesting and perennially topical Critic piece on the slow death of television news, something we've been watching now for quite a few years. We may not watch television news, but watching it collapse is interesting.


The slow, inexorable death of television news

Traditional broadcasters find themselves adrift in a radically different twenty-first century

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.


The whole piece is well worth reading, partly because the collapse of television news is a drama worth watching and partly because of frantic government efforts to control the direction of collapse.


“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.