A trend towards an increasingly tabloid-influenced agenda over the past few years could lead to foreign and more serious news becoming marginalised in TV news reporting, a new British study suggests.
Academics commissioned by the BBC and the Independent Television Commission found an increase in sport and consumer stories, with the reporting of politics falling off.
The report, "From Callaghan To Kosovo: Changing Trends In British Television News 19751999", says: "It may become increasingly difficult - particularly in the commercial sector - to resist the perceived mass audience appeal of less serious news items and thus accelerate the trend which seems to have started during the 1990s.
"We are not wholly optimistic that 10 years from now television news will have maintained its current balance." Researchers from the University of Westminster and Goldsmith's College analysed 700 bulletins. They broke the stories down into broad categories of tabloid (including consumer, showbusiness and crime stories), broadsheet (such as politics, social affairs and education) and foreign news.
Early and late evening bulletins on both ITV and BBC1, they found, had seen a strong broadsheet content dropping markedly from about 60 per cent in 1975 to just over 40 per cent in 1999 for BBC news slots, while for ITV the figure was down to about 33 per cent.
Channel 4 News had been remarkably consistent over the period, with broadsheet and foreign stories generally accounting for 90 per cent of the content.