Information Overload

There’s a lot of news at the moment and most of it is unbearably bad. So at times like these, I find myself very conflicted, because I always want to know what is happening both at home and abroad, but we now live in a world with multiple sources of information and much of it is at best highly partisan, and at worst either misleading or false. 

Like most people, especially of our generation, I would have once turned to the nightly news bulletins provided by the BBC and ITV. But not so much any more and I am not alone. 

There was a time in the very recent past when news bulletins were a reliable and regular source of audiences of four million plus viewers. But no longer, and that steep decline in viewing figures is happening very quickly. I read that statistic in the latest report on viewing and listening trends, published by Ofcom in August 2023, which also showed that, for the first time, there is evidence of a significant decline in average daily broadcast TV viewing among ‘core’ older audiences (aged 65+) and this has accelerated since the pandemic. 

This must be extremely alarming, especially to the BBC which relies on the licence fee for all its funding. If even us older people are finding alternative sources of information and entertainment, then for how many years will the current model endure? It has started to feel like the end of an era which began when I was a very young child.

My first proper memory of TV was watching Queen Elizabeth being crowned in 1953. It was in black and white on a ludicrously small screen, encased by a large brown box, and was avidly watched by our family in the company of all the neighbours. By the 1960s, mostly rented televisions were to be found in 75% of households across the UK, and the 1966 Football World Cup final attracted 32.3 million viewers across the BBC and ITV, the highest ever for a single programme either before or since. The Ofcom report shows that ‘national moments’ like King Charles’s coronation still draw a mass audience, usually for the BBC.

For all of my parents' life, BBC television was their main source of entertainment and information about national and international events. They loved all those programmes that then attracted a mass (20m+) viewing audience, including comedy programmes like Morecombe and Wise, the Two Ronnies. The Good Life and Porridge. They also looked forward to wonderfully produced drama series like ‘The Forsyte Saga’ and the original ‘Poldark’. And, every evening without fail, they would watch the latest BBC News before they went to bed.

As I have lived alone for most of the past thirty years, I have also seen television as my boon companion, in much the same way as my parents did. Some have a lofty disdain for ‘the box’ and consider sitting down to watch it as a terrible waste of time, but I have always loved it. However, just as the Ofcom report shows, I am quite rapidly changing my relationship to it as new sources of information and entertainment vie for my attention in the following ways:

1 - Once I would have planned my viewing schedule around the programmes printed in the Radio and TV Times. In other words I’d note what was on every day and decide what I wanted to see as they were broadcast. Nowadays I only do this for just three programmes: ‘Only Connect’ and ‘University Challenge’ on BBC 2 (Monday at 8pm and 8.30pm respectively because I love a nerdy quiz) and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ every Saturday evening on BBC One, probably for nostalgic reasons,  because it feels traditionally comforting as the nights draw in.

2 - Along with 59% of other households I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime (45%). On those many evenings when I feel that there's nothing on the TV that remotely interests me, which is most evenings apart from Mondays and Saturdays, I find a series on one or other of these platforms. I love nothing better than finding something with several series which I can devour individually or in chunks. A recent favourite was ‘Ozarks’ and just this weekend I watched all four episodes of ‘Beckham’ which, for a person that detests football, I found extremely enjoyable.

3 - I also use BBC iPlayer and ITV X to binge watch series that are being shown weekly on either the BBC or ITV, episode by episode. Sometimes this is for continuity because you forget what happens from one week to the next, but mostly it's because I find it much more enjoyable to get the impact of a good drama over a compressed timescale. I also use BBC Sounds in the same way. This is a very rich source of excellent listening, sometimes in bite-sized 15 minute chunks.

4 - I use Twitter a lot but maybe not for much longer as Elon Musk is doing his best to ruin it, but I do still check into the platform several times a day in order to stay plugged into all the latest developments both here and abroad.  It has become the source of most of my world news and what I love is the way that posts from respected journalists can lead you to articles,video, commentary and other reliable sources of information. You just have to be hyper-vigilant to avoid the nut-jobs and the conspiracy theorists.

5 - My parents used to have a newspaper delivered, but I no longer buy print media of any sort (this includes magazines). Instead, I have taken out online subscriptions to The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The New Statesman. That way I can read the articles promoted on Twitter which are invariably behind a paywall. The FT and New Statesman also send me email updates at the weekend detailing excellent, in-depth articles on all manner of subjects which help to keep me plugged into the zeitgeist.

6 - I have also become an avid listener to podcasts. I no longer have Radio 4 permanently on in the house, but choose to listen to the weekly podcasts of the Financial Times (Political Fix), The Guardian with John Harris, The New Statesman and The twice weekly output of Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics*. Every evening without fail, I listen to the Newsagents whilst in the bath with 3 ex-BBC journalists Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall (I mean that I listen in the bath, not that they’re in the bath with me!)

I watch or listen to all of this output either on my TV or laptop. I don’t have a smart speaker (yet) but love the flexibility of being able to (say) access Radio 4 live via my computer but with the ability to pause it if I need to do so. I also carry my laptop around my flat, just as I would once have done a transistor radio. It means that any of the media that I wish to consume is available whenever I want and wherever I want it. I would also say that this pattern of media content consumption has evolved for me over the past three or four years, which is consistent with the latest Ofcom findings.

Those Reithian principles, enshrined in the BBC Charter, to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ still hold good today in the sense that most people desperately want to be informed, educated and entertained. For most of my life sources of all three, whether in the print or broadcast media, were extremely limited and under the aegis of relatively few very powerful people. 

No more, and I welcome the range of choices and voices that are now open to me in my living room at the press of a button. However, where there is choice there can also be confusion, so I find myself having to work harder to truly understand what is going on.

It is well documented that with age can come rigidity of thought and belief. What I love about multiple sources of information is that it requires me to challenge my ageing brain in order to become at once more sceptical, more questioning and much more open-minded than I might be otherwise. This requires much less black or white thinking and forces me to see many more shades of grey (maybe as many as 50!)

*My recommendation for a balanced understanding of the current conflict in the Middle East: ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast with Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell has been an excellent source this week of ‘whole picture’ information on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There are one-hour long interviews worth listening to if you want to understand both perspectives: The first discussion is with Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and the second is with Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK.

Tricia x

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