The slow, inexorable death of television news

Traditional broadcasters find themselves adrift in a radically different twenty-first century with little influence or control

Fred Skulthorp

KAY BURLEY RETIRED FROM SKY NEWS IN February, disappearing from the airwaves in the dead of winter to an almost eerie indifference. In her valedictory speech she boasted not of journalistic scoops, merely of a stubborn endurance: “More hours of live TV than anyone in history.” In 2025, such a boast seems a rather strange claim to fame, one of those herculean yet irrelevant curios more at home in the Guinness Book of Records than the annals of statesmanship once reserved for public service broadcasting. Burley was escaping a sinking ship. At least this was the charge by her rival Camilla Tominey at the now-resurgent GB News. Last year Adam Boulton called for the channel to be banned by Ofcom to preserve “the delicate broadcast ecology in this country”. But…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2025

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