From John Simpson:

All the signs are that British people are simply becoming less interested in the world around them.

Once upon a time, we used to think that this kind of isolationism was something particularly American, like high levels of crime, the possession of guns and wide-scale drug addiction. Americans weren’t interested much in anything that happened outside their city and state, let alone outside their country, whereas Britons were.

Now, however, we find that in all of these areas – crime, drugs and isolationism – Britain was merely lagging behind America. It wasn’t fundamentally different, after all.

It’s not so long ago that watching the Nine O’clock News on the BBC or the News At Ten on Independent Television was a kind of national duty for large numbers of people. When I presented the Nine O’clock News myself in 1981 and 82, it was felt to be my fault – and that of the other main presenter, John Humphrys – if the audience dropped below ten million.

It took people some time to realise that the number watching news programmes was slowly falling away. Today, the BBC thinks it’s done well when it gets an audience of five million for the 10pm bulletin.

So what should we do? We have popularised our reporting and our agenda: that hasn’t worked. We have tried a dozen facelifts and relaunches: no good. We have dropped some of our best presenters and brought in young, attractive people, who have done nothing to increase the ratings.

And now? It seems to me that we should first of all accept the situation, and then go back to basics. In an age when no one disapproves if you are ignorant about the world, and where reality seems less important to the programme-makers than reality shows, television news shouldn’t try so hard to attract an audience that it will probably never see again.

Instead, I feel, we should use the opportunity to return to the original principles outlined by the BBC’s founder John Reith: the business of informing and educating people as well as entertaining them. That may not be fashionable, but it’s what we know we ought to be doing. Forget the focus groups and even, if necessary, the viewing figures – let’s tell people what we think they ought to know. This idea is appallingly elitist, of course, and that alone is probably enough to ensure that it will never be implemented.

But expecting your audience to tell you what sort of news you should give them is like telling your doctor what sort of treatment you would like. Maybe the ratings will drop even more; but we’ll know we’ve done the job right.

Well, people read more books than ever, especially jeremiads by television personalities. So why are they watching less TV news? They just have more alternatives, and so they watch less.

People aren’t retreating from news programmes, a lot of them really only watched the news because they had to.

As for the back-to-basics stuff, well it makes sense when you can’t compete with entertainment not to offer an entertainment news alternative. So you might as well satisfy a smaller audience which wants serious news without the celebrity fluff.

This is what Channel 4 News does so successfully, and the price that advertising-funded Channel 4 pays is roughly half the audience that it could get in that slot with non-news programming.

Funnily enough, in a commercial environment, the BBC is doing exactly that with BBC World News America. But for the BBC not to do it on BBC1 – a channel entirely independent of advertising – beats me. But then it beats Simpson too.