The Thinker

The Times has picked up on an interview with the BBC's new Editorial Director, Kamal Ahmed, conducted on Sunday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival by part-time Beeboid and man of letters Allan Little.

Kamal admitted that younger generations including his own children did not watch the 10pm news on BBC1, and that the programme had not evolved much over nearly thirty years - somebody coming forward from 1990 to view the News at Ten in 2018 would “pretty much recognise what they are seeing. Our younger audience do not watch linear news. It does not mean they are not engaged in news, they just do not watch 34 minutes of news packaged up.”

In worse news for Newsnight, Today, Politics Live and many other news outlets, he said “One of the issues we have and the challenges we face [is that] we have some structures in the BBC and ways of doing news which are challenged in this new environment we are in and I think in particular of what is called the ‘disco’, a discussion between two opposing sides about one issue. In a polarised world and a world of such passions we should think more often about whether that is the most illuminating way of explaining.”

Kamal said he had been asked, as part of the newly created role, to rethink how News supplies news, adding that any new approach should be clear by 2022, the BBC’s centenary. (Presumably all copies of the seminal James Harding work, The Future of News, have been lost.)  He said that there would be consideration of how the BBC covers issues but also of “how we do news ” across television, radio and digital.

In a nod to his old role as Economics Editor, yet to be picked up by the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Express and Sun, he questioned the future of capitalism in the UK.  “Capitalism has simply failed in its central promise; you might put up with inequality, with vast salaries for the people at the very top of the corporate world, if you believe that you, your family and friends can get on and can feel a little better by stint of the sweat of your brow. That has ceased to be true. And you can trace from that many of the political issues that have come afterwards, because many people are dissatisfied with the system.”