Council advice to the Â鶹Éç Trust

Children’s service review (July 2008)

We noted that the Â鶹Éç’s commitment to younger audiences was particularly important in the light of the debate on the future of public service broadcasting. Careful scheduling was necessary to ensure that children’s programmes were available to the maximum audience, and we urged schedulers to take account of the public value of programmes for children when making decisions about when they should be broadcast.

Following the debate on public trust in broadcasters, we stressed that the Â鶹Éç’s customary high standards should be strictly maintained in the future. We welcomed the measures taken by the Trust to this end.

There was evidence that younger audiences responded strongly to content set in a context they recognised as their own. We noted interest in children’s programmes when Scottish schools are on holiday but other UK schools are not.

Monitoring report on network news (November 2008)

In autumn 2008 we monitored Â鶹Éç network news to assess accuracy in reporting of devolved matters, relevance for audiences in the nations, coverage of stories from the nations, repetition or lack of co-ordination, and the extent of comparative reporting. We concluded that network news had achieved greater accuracy, and combined a wider variety of perspectives following the Impartiality Review. However there was room for further progress in accuracy and richness of coverage. News coverage from the devolved nations was often brief and could appear tokenistic.

The problem of repetition in the Six and Reporting Scotland remained. Instead of two versions of a Scottish story, designed with different audiences in mind, viewers in Scotland would be better served by a single, more comprehensive report. We noted the contrast with the blending of UK and Scottish news on Radio Scotland’s integrated news service.