BBC News

• 1. Introduction

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  BBC News first went on air on the 14th of November 1922, when a radio announcer at station 2LO read those now-famous words: "This is London calling. Here is the first general news bulletin, copyright by Reuters, Press Association, Exchange Telegraph and Central News." That single bulletin launched what would become the world's largest broadcast news organisation. Today, BBC News employs over 5,500 journalists, maintains more than 50 foreign bureaus, and generates around 120 hours of radio and television output every single day. How did a service that was once forbidden by newspaper publishers from reporting its own stories grow into a global institution reaching 450 million people every week? And what happens when an organisation devoted to impartiality is accused, simultaneously, of being too pro-government and too anti-government, too pro-Israel and too pro-Palestine, too left-wing and too right-wing? Those tensions are at the heart of what BBC News is and what it has always tried to be.

• 2. Shackled and Then Freed

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  Newspaper publishers feared the BBC from the start. In the early years of radio, they pressured the government to stop the BBC from broadcasting news before 7 p.m. and to force it to use wire-service copy rather than its own reporting. That constraint slowly loosened. By 1934, BBC News had created its own news operation, though the ban on pre-6 p.m. broadcasts held until World War II.

  Television brought its own constraints. The first televised bulletin, on the 5th of July 1954, was broadcast from leased studios at Alexandra Palace in London. Richard Baker provided narration entirely off-screen while still images were shown on screen. On-screen newsreaders did not appear until 1955, when Kenneth Kendall became the first newsreader to appear in vision, joined by Robert Dougall and Baker. That change came three weeks before the commercial broadcaster ITN launched on the 21st of September 1955, a rivalry that would shape BBC News for decades.

  The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 was a turning point for television as a medium. An estimated 27 million people watched in the UK, surpassing radio's audience of 12 million for the first time. Twenty-one cameras in central London fed the pictures to Alexandra Palace. The UK held around two million TV licences that year, a number that rose past three million the following year and reached four and a half million by 1955.

• 3. Competing With ITN

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  Hugh Carleton Greene became head of News and Current Affairs in 1958, and on the 1st of January 1960, he became Director-General. Greene studied the competitor closely. ITN had been rated highly by internal study groups, and Greene set out to make BBC reporting resemble ITN's bolder style. He opened a newsroom at Alexandra Palace, recruited television reporters, and gave them the authority to write and voice their own scripts without also having to serve the radio side.

  On the 20th of June 1960, Nan Winton became the first female BBC network newsreader to appear in vision. The same year saw the launch of radio programmes including The Ten O'Clock News. When BBC2 started transmission on the 20th of April 1964, it broadcast a new show called Newsroom. The World at One, a lunchtime programme, began on the 4th of October 1965 on what was then the Home Service.

  Colour television arrived on the 7th of March 1968, when Newsroom on BBC2 moved to an early evening slot and became the first UK news programme transmitted in colour, from Studio A at Alexandra Palace. The facilities were limited at first: the newsroom had only one RCA colour Quadruplex videotape machine and eventually two Pye plumbicon colour telecines. Much of the insert material remained in black and white for some time after, because film coverage shot outside London had not yet shifted to colour reversal stock. The Nine O'Clock News launched on the 14th of September 1970, with Robert Dougall presenting the first week from studio N1.

• 4. Into the Field

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  Some of BBC News's most consequential moments came from reporters working in difficult conditions rather than studio anchors reading scripts. In 1982, during the Falklands War, cameraman Bernard Hesketh used an Ikegami camera to file electronic footage from a conflict zone. It was the first time BBC News had relied on an electronic camera rather than film in a war zone. Hesketh won the Royal Television Society Cameraman of the Year award and received a BAFTA nomination for that coverage. The coverage is also remembered for Brian Hanrahan's reporting. Hanrahan was barred from stating how many aircraft had taken part in a raid, so he told viewers: "I'm not allowed to say how many planes joined the raid, but I counted them all out and I counted them all back." That phrase became cited as an example of good reporting under pressure.

  In October 1984, Michael Buerk filed reports for the Six O'Clock News showing millions of people starving in the Ethiopian famine. Buerk described what he witnessed on the 23rd of October as "a biblical famine in the 20th century" and "the closest thing to hell on Earth." BBC News was the first to document the famine to that scale. The report shocked viewers across Britain and motivated donations to relief agencies including Save the Children. Bob Geldof saw the report and organised the charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" to raise money for famine relief, followed by the Live Aid concert in July 1985.

  Kate Adie's live broadcasting from the Iranian Embassy Siege in 1980 was nominated for a BAFTA for actuality coverage, though the award that year went to ITN.

• 5. The Hutton Crisis

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  In 2003, following the invasion of Iraq, BBC News broadcast a series of reports that would bring the corporation to the edge of collapse. Three reports, including Andrew Gilligan's report on Today, cited an anonymous source who claimed the British government had embellished the September Dossier by exaggerating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. The government accused BBC News of poor journalism. The corporation stood by its reporting.

  On the 9th of July 2003, David Kelly was identified in the press as Gilligan's source. Kelly was found dead by suicide in a field near his home on the 18th of July. Lord Hutton's inquiry was announced the following day. His report, published on the 28th of January 2004, concluded that Gilligan's accusation was "unfounded" and that BBC editorial and management processes were "defective." The report found that Director of News Richard Sambrook had accepted Gilligan's account despite his notes being incomplete, and that Director General Greg Dyke had assured the Prime Minister that a satisfactory internal inquiry had taken place.

  Chairman Gavyn Davies resigned on the day of publication. Greg Dyke resigned the following day, and Gilligan resigned on the 30th of January. Despite the internal crisis, an ICM poll in April 2003 found that BBC News had sustained its position as the best and most trusted provider of news in the UK. On the 16th of April 2013, incoming Director-General Tony Hall named James Harding, a former editor of The Times of London, as Director of News and Current Affairs.

• 6. Building a Global Newsroom

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  From August 2012 to March 2013, all BBC News operations moved from Television Centre, where they had been based since 1969, to refurbished facilities at Broadcasting House in Portland Place. The move began on the 2nd of September 2012 with the domestic programme The Andrew Marr Show and concluded on the 18th of March 2013 with the move of the BBC News channel and domestic bulletins. The new extension includes several radio and television studios centred around an 11-storey atrium. It is now the largest live newsroom in Europe.

  BBC News Online launched in November 1997. By April 2021 it recorded 1.2 billion website visits in a single month and is used by 60% of UK internet users for news. In October 2019, BBC News Online launched a mirror on the Tor anonymity network to help users in countries where the site is censored. Mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone systems have been available since 2010.

  The BBC World Service broadcasts to around 150 million people in English and 27 other languages. As of 2024, the full BBC reaches an average of 450 million people per week, with the World Service accounting for 320 million of those. India holds the largest number of people using BBC services anywhere in the world. In May 2025, a BBC News Myanmar television bulletin began broadcasting on a vacated Voice of America satellite frequency following the earthquake that hit Myanmar and Thailand.

• 7. The Impartiality Problem

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  The BBC's royal charter requires it to be free from both political and commercial influence. That requirement has generated a continuous argument about whether the obligation is ever actually met. The BBC is regularly accused by the government of the day of bias in favour of the opposition and, by the opposition, of bias in favour of the government. During the Falklands War, an edition of Newsnight was described as "almost treasonable" by MP John Page. During the first Gulf War, critics labelled the organisation the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation." During the Kosovo War, British ministers called it the "Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation."

  A Cardiff University School of Journalism study of Iraq War coverage found that nine out of ten BBC references to weapons of mass destruction assumed Iraq possessed them and only one in ten questioned that assumption. The study also found BBC was the most likely of the main British broadcasters to use British government and military sources and the least likely to use independent sources such as the Red Cross. The report's author, Justin Lewis, wrote that the findings gave "credence to those who criticised the BBC for being too sympathetic to the government in its war coverage."

  Former Director-General Mark Thompson acknowledged in a public statement that the BBC had been biased toward the left in the past. He described "a massive bias to the left" in current affairs among staff in the organisation he had joined 30 years earlier, while arguing that the younger generation of BBC journalists was less tribally political. In 2023, BBC News joined with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 69 media partners, including more than 270 journalists in 55 countries, to produce the "Cyprus Confidential" report on financial networks supporting Vladimir Putin. Government officials including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides began responding to its findings in less than 24 hours.