BBC urged to address in-house religious illiteracy

A former BBC editor and executive has called on the Corporation to educate its journalists on the importance of religion.

Speaking to the Religion Media Centre, Roger Bolton identified a ‘relative illiteracy’ among BBC journalists “about religion, both what it is and the way it’s practiced”.

Across all public service broadcasters, the number of hours devoted to ‘Religion and Ethics’ programming fell from 243 in 2010 to 140 in 2022 – a drop of 42 per cent over twelve years.

Strategy

Bolton noted a “mismatch on the whole between the importance of religion to people throughout the country and the way it’s represented in the media, however well it’s done”.

He said that journalists at the BBC “tend to be sceptical” about religion and fail to properly grasp its importance for understanding the ‘past, present and future’.

A “strategic shift” was required at the very top, he argued, “about the importance of religion and religious literacy” and he suggested that the national broadcaster should continually “educate its own journalists” on these issues.

‘Unfiltered’

Writing in The Daily Telegraph in March, columnist Catherine Pepinster lamented an evident “marked decline in the Corporation’s religious output”.

She feared that “religion will be hard-pressed to fight for the BBC’s ever-decreasing pool of cash when there are more lucrative drama and entertainment programmes to be commissioned”.

Unless the BBC acts, she warned, “even more viewers wanting religious coverage will desert it for outlets like YouTube, home to plenty of fascinating material but much of it is unfiltered and without any editorial rigour”.