That was the year that was for media

Opinion

Ray Snoddy casts his mind back over the past 12 months to pick out the plotlines and politicos that have informed his weekly column.

The best of the media year came in December in the form of Channel 4’s Cathy Newman, who was named Journalist of the Year and Interviewer of the Year in the British Press Awards for her year-long investigation into abuses and cover-ups in the Church of England.

First, Newman tracked down and confronted serial Church of England abuser John Smyth, and then 2025 began with the forced resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, following a Newman interview that mercilessly exposed his shortcomings.

It was the first time in Church history that such a thing had happened, and Newman’s awards contributed to no less than six Channel 4 prizes overall, including being chosen as News Provider of the Year, for the second successive year.

Would such a thing have happened if the initial Conservative plan to privatise the channel had gone ahead?

In an uncertain world of intense competition and strained advertising budgets, the Channel 4 achievement stood out as the epitome of what public service broadcasting should and can be about.

Scandals and misjudgements

In another award full of unfortunate symbolism, Channel 4 also won the foreign broadcasting award for the Gaza documentary Doctors Under Attack, a BBC programme that the Corporation had sat on for months.

It was just one of many BBC misjudgements that culminated in the greatest scandal of the year, or indeed of many years, the mis-editing of a President Trump speech by Panorama that went on to bring down a BBC director-general and the chief executive of BBC News.

It was a corporate explosion that seemed to come from nowhere. The editing together of two different parts of a Trump speech into one apparently continuous sentence had not been noticed or complained of at the time.

Then the, possibly politically motivated, internal leak to The Daily Telegraph, led to rows between management and board about how to handle the situation, followed by the usual dither and delay,  which in turn led to criticism of BBC chairman Samir Shah.

When DG Tim Davie left, it was partly due to exhaustion, while Deborah Turness took responsibility for her team.

For a time, things looked really bad – some feared, or wanted it to be, existential for the BBC.

Trump said he was going to sue and wanted up to $5 bn in compensation, and the usual enemies of the BBC either said the Corporation should be closed down or, at the very least, that it should lose its licence fee funding.

By the end of the year, much of the dust had settled. However, Trump has now filed his lawsuit, but without sufficient evidence, his lawyers will simply be rattling on the door handle of the court. When Prospect magazine showed the Panorama edition to two American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, both said it was scarcely a hanging offence.

Reform of the BBC’s governance will now need urgent attention next year.

AI goes mainstream

Away from the glory and the scandals, 2025 was the year when Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism stepped out of the shadows and entered the mainstream.

It is not clear yet whether an AI bubble will burst in investment terms. But it is now clear that whether that happens or not, the technology and its possible effect on journalism are not going to go away.

There is a benign consensus, perhaps too benign, that AI is overall beneficial to journalists in that it will take on the routine, drudge work, thereby releasing more people to spend more time on investigative work on digging out significant stories.

At the Financial Times, they have been using AI systems to cover stories that would be quite impossible by conventional means.

An FT team, led by Chris Cook, assembled published job ads in Russia – 10 million in all -which showed, initially, pay rates were rising to cope with a labour shortage, but that later pay rates were dropping while inflation was rising, suggesting the economy was overheating and possibly heading for instability.

Laura Dubois, in the FT’s Brussels office, used AI to interrogate the public declarations on second jobs of 720 MEPs.

She found out that not all such activities were being properly declared, and conflicts of interest were revealed.

The main FT conclusion is that AI is great for search, but that analysis and conclusions are best left to humans.

The danger is that AI in the wrong hands can be used to flood the internet with disinformation or that, in cash-strapped local newspapers, journalists could be replaced by little more than bots.

The jury is still out.

Talk of takeovers

Another obvious theme of the year has been growing moves towards consolidation in both the UK and the US.

For years, the takeover of ITV has been confidently predicted, but it has never happened until now, at least in part.

Sky, owned by Comcast of the US, is in talks to take over the broadcasting arm, although the company is holding on to its programme production.

Presumably, Sky would then be responsible for programme commissioning. Under Comcast ownership, it isn’t easy to envisage a programme such as Mr Bates v the Post Office, loss-making despite the plaudits, ever being made by ITV again.

Further consolidation in the national newspaper industry now seems likely, subject to regulatory permission, as the Daily Mail and General Trust pushes ahead with a £500m bid for The Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

If completed, it will bring to an end two years of limbo for Telegraph management.

Meanwhile, although accurate numbers are no longer available for all titles, over the year some publications have dropped a further 10% in sales, in what has become a sad routine.

Takeover activity in the UK pales in comparison to the bloody and highly politicised multi-billion-dollar takeovers underway in the US.

The battle is underway for Warner Bros Discovery, home of Wonder Woman and CNN. 

Netflix thought it had sealed the deal with Warner’s acceptance of an $83bn offer. But this is America in the days of Trump and Paramount, and Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person after Elon Musk, has launched a higher hostile offer.

Ellison is a friend of President Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is part of the Paramount consortium.

Given the state of probity in the Trump administration, such relationships will, for now, trump everything. It could be a rocky new year for CNN, a news network Trump hates.

How much of Trump’s power and influence will survive deep into 2026 is, however, another matter entirely. 

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.