Abstract
Abstract There has never been a greater need for reliable, truthful news to help citizens navigate and assess the veracity of what they are reading and viewing, especially on social media. Widespread concerns around ‘fake’ news demonstrate an enduring requirement for curated and trustworthy children’s news that addresses children as young citizens with certain rights. Drawing on recent UK events, we discuss the case for children’s news provision by public service broadcasting (PSB) from a communication rights perspective by analyzing the BBC’s 2019 plans to reduce the broadcast presence and originated hours of its flagship news service, Newsround, in favor of online distribution.
Highlights
Despite widespread agreement that production of trustworthy news is central to the health of democratic societies, in times of political, economic, ecological, and public health insecurity, children’s news is not generally regarded as a core policy issue
This work is licensed a greater range of interests and diverse audiences, are forcing broadcasters to rethink how they meet public service broadcasting (PSB) obligations to children (Potter and Steemers, 2020). These obligations are not always clearly set out in PSB statutes. In this respect the UK is unusual because the BBC’s original 2017 Operating Licence, administered by the Office of Communications (Ofcom), expressly obliged it to provide news for children, including a quota of 85 hours of broadcast news per year (Ofcom, 2017a, p. 11), a requirement which does not apply to its PSB Dutch and German counterparts
The questions we address here focus on 1) the role and significance of children’s news as part of PSB’s wider remit within a transforming media landscape; 2) how policy around children’s news has been framed and articulated and by whom, using the BBC’s proposals for Newsround and stakeholder responses as a case study; and 3) the longer-term implications for PSB’s commitment to children’s news and responsiveness to children’s voices in a multiplatform environment where children have rights
Summary
Despite widespread agreement that production of trustworthy news is central to the health of democratic societies, in times of political, economic, ecological, and public health insecurity, children’s news is not generally regarded as a core policy issue. We contemplate the longer-term implications of potential policy failure in regulating for children’s news as part of a public service remit This connects with a wider children’s rights discourse where decisions are often taken without consulting children and without research-informed analysis of the changing shape and volume of news, journalistic news values, scheduling, platform choices, technological transformation, and a deeper understanding of how children find and access news (Carter et al, 2009; Notley, Deuanni, Zhong, and Howden, 2017)
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