Nice news

From the news and current affairs section of the Ofcom annual report on Public Sector Broadcasting... (they mean tv). It's a shame they put in so few comparisons with Sky....

Audience impact

BBC One was the only PSB channel to increase its rating on “Its programmes help me understand what’s going on in the world today” in 2008 from 2007. In 2008 it stood out above the other channels in its rating in this area (BBC One 83%, BBC Two 69%, ITV1 67%, Channel 4 55%). Both Five and Channel 4 saw decreases from 2007 to 2008 in the proportion of regular viewers rating them highly on this measure.

Trustworthy News continues to be seen as being particularly well-delivered by BBC One (79%), BBC Two (70%) and ITV1 (68%) by regular viewers of the channels. BBC Three’s and BBC Four’s ratings on how trustworthy their news is increased significantly in 2008 from 2006 (50% and 56% respectively in 2008). These increases for the BBC digital channels sit alongside increases in ratings for BBC One, ITV1 and Five.

BBC News 24/BBC News rated extremely highly on this PSB element.

Views in the nations about the provision of nations/regions news vary, but the main findings are that:

In 2006 in Wales, Northern Ireland and England, regular viewers rated ITV1 and BBC One similarly, but in 2008 BBC One started to edge ahead of ITV1 on this measure.

In Scotland in 2006, regular viewers rated ITV1 more positively on this measure than BBC One, but in 2008 there was no significant difference between the ratings of the channels.

Pulse data from 2008 show that over 80% of responses rated News programmes on each channel as being of high quality. Responses to News programmes on BBC Two and Channel 4 were more likely than other programmes to be the positive responses from their viewers; for over 90% of each channels’ responses, viewers agreed’ that they were of high quality.