“Nannying” ITC Awaits ITV Proposal To Raise News Audiences

The Independent Television Commission’s (ITC) actions so far regarding falling ITV news audience figures (see ITV Must Address News Audience Decline, Says ITC) have raised concern from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) that the Commission is taking a “nannying” approach. The ITC has confirmed that ITV is currently preparing a proposal of measures to halt its declining news audience figures, which is required in time for the Commission’s meeting on 18 May.

It has not been made clear what will happen if ITV fails to come up with a viable proposal and there has been no precedent set for this issue. The ITC says it will not put a target on audience figures, just that ITV must stop the decline. Nor will it put a deadline on results until the proposals have been received.

“The fact that ITV evening audiences are generally up shows that people like what they are being given,” said IPA Media Policy Group spokesman Jim Marshall. “Against this background, demanding that stations should increase the news viewership smacks of forcing the public to watch what is good for them, rather that what they would like,” he added.

A spokesman for the ITC today pointed out that although much of the public pressure put on ITV since the changes a year ago has centred on the popular News at Ten, the real problem lies with regional programming. When he announced the decline in figures, ITC chairman Sir Robin Biggam said that: “The changes to the schedule have had an unacceptable impact overall on regional news audiences with a decline in aggregate audiences for main regional news magazines of 22%.” He went on to point out that this had been reduced to 16.4% following further changes to the schedule (see ITC Allows ITV To Reschedule Regional Programmes). Even with these measures, ITC figures indicate audience drops from 1999 to 2000 of as much as 33% for North East Tonight and 25% for HTV News (West). In comparison, the drop in total audience for the early and late news bulletins combined is fairly small at 13.9%.

ITC research into public opinion seems to show that the public have little complaint about the quality or content of ITV news programming, but are more upset by the change in scheduling. It has been suggested, for example, that putting regional news programming before instead of after the early evening national bulletin could be responsible for the audience decline in that area. This could present more of a problem to ITV in coming up with a solution. “When ITV suggested these changes, they said that audiences would get used to them in a few years,” said an ITC spokesperson. “We thought that you should be able to see some evidence of that in one year, but we haven’t.”

Independent Television Commission: 020 7255 3000 Institute of Practitioners in Advertising: 020 7235 7020 ITV: 020 7843 8000