Making Sense of Our War Torn World

More than two years have passed since I left the BBC and now I’m outside, I’ve been able to take advantage of the burgeoning appetite for journalism about geopolitics, conflict, defence and diplomacy. There are big audiences for this, with legacy media organisations developing their international security coverage and new players emerging from YouTube to TikTok.

Early in 2024, when I began actively to plan my escape route from our national broadcaster, the editor of the Sunday Times told me, “you couldn’t be doing this at a better time”. How right he was, soon after leaving I started as a columnist on his newspaper.

I’ve looked for other opportunities too, having a very happy eight months making The Crisis Room podcast for Global and when, much to my chagrin, that finished, I then went to Channel 4 News where I now co-host a weekly strand of their Fourcast pod called Indicators. I’ve also been making videos for the Times Originals YouTube channel that now go out under the Defence Decoded strand.

If you’re thinking ‘so far, so smug’, I’m really not. I’m citing these activities (and of course my substack is another example) because some people ask ‘what are you doing now’ and to say that there are opportunities out there for an experienced national security journalist.

Enough of my portfolio existence. The case is best made by looking at what others are up to.

Reuters news agency is expanding its defence team, and Sky News will be launching a defence and security app in a few weeks’ time. That’s right, a whole UK-facing news service devoted to the subject.

Meanwhile legacy media, from the Economist where outgoing defence editor Shashank Joshi contributed to podcasts as well as video strands to the Telegraph, where their award-winning Ukraine podcast continues to play to solid audiences, there is so much good content. And if I wanted to see the verdict of retired naval commander Tom Sharpe on MoD’s plans for an autonomous fleet, I could find it on The Sun’s YouTube channel (6.5m subscribers) as well as his own one on that platform.

Tom is the sort of person I would have got on Newsnight to talk about this back in the day when we made taped reports, or maybe Captain John Foreman, ex-UK defence attaché to Moscow. He did an interview recently for The Sun’s channel that got 353k views, which is similar to the audience for my old BBC programme.

Look outside the accounts associated with legacy media and there is much else going on. One example: Mark Felton Productions, a YouTube channel that established a big audience (2.42m subscribers) with explainers about World War Two and the Nazis has also been posting videos about current geopolitics, one a couple of weeks ago on whether Argentina could invade the Falklands has already had more than 1m views.

So where is our public service broadcaster in all this? Among its 5,500 journalists it has a single defence correspondent – and tried to get rid of even this post a few years ago. The move was stopped after personal representations to the BBC by the Chief of the General Staff.

Of course there are several other reporters there who cover conflict, often very bravely, and the security correspondent sometimes steps in too. But my long experience at the BBC tells me there are very few people there who have a passionate interest in military or diplomatic affairs, or who have served in the armed forces, and who might therefore be able to report with authority on the strategies adopted by today’s warring parties.

Instead, the progressive values of that and indeed many other newsrooms in western countries, have since the Balkan wars of the 1990s focused on daily death tolls, usually of non-combatant victims. Evidently, this is an important part of many conflicts, particularly one like Gaza, but the desire to reduce things to ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ has distinct limitations. Indeed, it also gives very little idea why Trump’s war on Iran, to seize upon just one example, was so ill-conceived, and how the Iranians by their prior preparations and strategic nous, seem to have pulled off a remarkable victory.

As the national political arguments about defence spending ebb and flow, it cannot be a good thing that the BBC’s output on the subject is so slim. Military chiefs complain that attitudes might be quite different if voters were better informed about the poor readiness of our armed forces as well as the dangers of Britain being drawn into a major conflict.

In many other places – from Sky News, The Sun, and Channel 4 News no less – there have been impressive attempts to address this. Starting with Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Sky did daily military updates, taking academics or ex-military people to compensate for a lack of in-house expertise. And why not? They’ve found that videos about Ukrainian drones or Iranian forces can get terrific numbers of views on digital platforms.

Back in 2022 some reporting I and the Newsnight team did on a Russian unit that had got mauled in Ukraine, the 331^st Parachute Assault Regiment was posted on BBC Online, where the page attracted more than 10m views. A few months later, when we offered them a follow up, they weren’t interested.

Someone still working there tells me that’s not changed, “defence really isn’t loved at the BBC”. But why on earth forego millions of hits given the organisation now says digital audiences are its top priority? “Editors at Online have made clear to me”, comes the reply, “that the sort of people who view those pages, basically older men, are not of interest to them, that their priority is younger audiences”.

There have been one or two exceptions to this woeful trend, notably Security Brief, an occasional strand on the BBC News channel fronted by Christian Fraser and former Royal Air Force officer Mikey Kay. A strong episode gets hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

But overall, the Corporation has made less effort to provide coverage of the strategic forces at work in our roiling world than many news organisations with far smaller staffs.

They have shut down Ukrainecast, covering that war, and I know from my forlorn attempts to get such a thing commissioned while I still worked there, that the BBC is uninterested in a geopolitics or defence podcast. Their indifference to the subject, despite ample evidence of the millions of views such content could get, helped trigger my departure.

During the Covid pandemic, the BBC had 14 health correspondents – quite rightly, the story completely dominated the airwaves. But these days, insiders tell me there is no likelihood of them boosting defence or conflict specialists while the organisation is implementing yet another wave of cuts.

So, starved of cash, and with a strong headwind of a staff culture that fears anything that could be labelled ‘war mongering’, we might as well accept than in this moment of international flux, BBC News is most unlikely to assign more people or launch new output on this subject. The situation outside that division is even worse, be it the dearth of military history documentaries or producing a military drama of the quality of the Northern Ireland police series Blue Lights.

That’s a great shame because many of the legacy BBC programmes still get audiences in the millions. And while it might be possible to rake in hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers by combining the Sunday Times, Defence Decoded videos, or the C4N Indicators podcast, there were certainly advantages to having all of one’s output with Auntie.

It is true also that while there has been a great flourishing of coverage from other newsrooms, many of these depend on platforms like YouTube or TikTok with their own algorithmic peculiarities. Some of these brave new ventures, covering the international security world will no doubt fold, since these tech firms demand big numbers before they’ll pay meaningful revenue.

So many flowers may have bloomed in the world of defence or geopolitical journalism of late. I predict that demand will remain as long as there are big conflicts ongoing around the world – and the reluctance of our great British public broadcaster to satisfy it ultimately leaves more room for others.