[Radio_man]

I think today was a good example where the Channel just isn’t working.

The Today programme had genuinely agenda setting interviews this morning, and set up for a non-stop cascade of stories and developments through the day.

That was captured very well on Sky, rounded off with Ridge tonight. On the BBC, no sense of pace or purpose to grabbing their own agenda-setting and moving the story on.

Mainly because that’s almost impossible to do when you have two audiences to serve, and also because in politics it can be the drip-drip of multiple stories (schools, reshuffles, Pincher, etc) that creates a narrative and an agenda. None of which is big enough for a standalone stream/break out but together are important.

This will be the situation of the next 12 months in the run up to the UK General Election. UK and US politics will be fighting for airtime and relevance on the channel. If the UK and US elections are both next autumn, with the UK election possibly late October or early November, with the US Presidential election also being on 5 November 2024, editorially it'll be a nightmare to get the right balance.