Country Life

The new boys at BBC News are cocking a snook at the Trust. In 2003, a Trust-commissioned report on coverage of rural affairs recommended the appointment of a specialist correspondent to beef up output, and we had first Tom Heap, now with Countryfile, and then Jeremy Cooke. In 2012, Newsgathering closed the post of Rural Affairs Correspondent. This year, Heather Hancock was commissioned to review BBC reporting of "the countryside", and her top recommendation - re-instatement of a Rural Affairs Correspondent.

Her report includes comments which seem to back the idea, from news insiders...

“Over the next five years, one of my top priorities is that people look at the BBC and think that’s a news organisation that’s really telling you what’s happening in your country.”
James Harding, Director, BBC News

“We need to find mechanisms to alert us to things which are taking place which are not on our institutional radar. A Rural Affairs Correspondent would clearly be one mechanism.”
Ceri Thomas, former Head of News Programmes

“The rural affairs brief is one of the most challenging. It covers health care to food production to GM crops, cutting edge science to social affairs”
Jeremy Cooke

And Heather weighs in further...

I share the view of Jeremy Cooke, the last holder of this post, that asking everyone to ensure their stories are “rural proof”, rather than have specialist responsibility means it just doesn’t happen – the evidence in this review bears this out, since it clearly isn’t happening. I spoke to one senior editorial figure who thought the BBC suffered from a “domestic UK news deficit”. He felt the BBC was not good at reporting its own country – and saw a lot of its most talented correspondents wanting to take up foreign postings.

So the response of News ? 

For Network News, the Rural Affairs Correspondent post – which, as its top recommendation, the report wishes to reinstate – is an expensive post, based outside London with its own dedicated team and equipment. As the author herself recognises, “in a continuing era of cost cutting at the BBC, making the case for a new, costly, dedicated post will be challenging”. 

We agree, so we intend to approach the task slightly differently.... 

I.E. We're not doing what were told.  The Trust may care to peruse recent appointments within News, to see if they agree with the spending priorities of Messrs Harding and Munro.