British Broadcasting Regulation

Regulation has played a major role in the development of British broadcast journalism. In a number of areas British broadcasting regulation has been more rigorous and extensive than that in other Western democracies. British regulators have set high standards for broadcast content—not only in traditional areas for regulation such as taste and offence (the portrayal of sex and violence, offensive language) but also in journalism—requiring broadcast news and current affairs to be both accurate and impartial.

As well as setting content standards, regulators have also been closely involved in determining the structure of British broadcasting and assessing the quality of its program output. Regulation has extended to the scheduling and length of news programs, their resources and budgets, as well as the amount of current affairs programming. At the same time, the regulatory bodies, in a country that does not have the same constitutional protection of freedom of expression as the United States, have had to maintain their own independence from political and commercial influence and protect the independence of the broadcasters.

For much of the twentieth century this approach to broadcasting regulation helped ensure high programming standards in both publicly funded and commercial broadcasters. The benefits of this competition were most clearly seen in journalism, where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and its commercial counterparts were encouraged to devote substantial resources and air time to high quality journalism. But with the growth of a more competitive media market in multichannel television and online media at the end of the century, the traditional British model came under severe pressure, and the role of regulation in commercial broadcasting began to weaken, although it continued to have a major role in publicly funded media like the BBC. The implications for British broadcast journalism were significant.