New research report launched – Screening the World June 2008

IBT has commissioned this new research because it addresses the international content of three key genres – children’s, factual and news – which are crucial to the future of public service broadcasting. Television is the main source of information about the wider world for most people in the UK. Yet, as this research shows, there are some worrying trends, with a narrowing of the range of countries, stories and voices featuring in international coverage.

Children’s programming is particularly at risk. As global citizens, children need access to information about the lives and cultures of people in other countries and television has a vital role to play in providing this. In chapter 1, for the first time, we measure the nature and volume of children’s programming with international content, in order to have a clearer understanding of what information about the wider world is available for children on television in the UK.

The second chapter of this report is the latest installment in a unique longitudinal study, first commissioned by IBT in 1989, which has tracked the changing nature of international factual programming on UK television. The statistics for 2007 show that BBC2 and Channel 4 dominate, but there is a continuing migration of international factual programming to digital channels, where they are less likely to reach wide audiences.

Chapter three explores some of the issues raised by the coverage of the post election violence in Kenya and highlights the difficulties which UK broadcasters face in reporting a fast moving and complex news story. The audience was unprepared and the early reporting provided little context and too much emphasis on tribal causes.

Mark Galloway
Director, International Broadcasting Trust

Download the full report here (pdf 1.9Mb)

and

Download the Press Release here