‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’: Placing Children at the Centre of Public Service and News Media

This article puts forward the view that children should be placed at the centre of any attempts to reshape public service media provision and make news and current affairs programmes more relevant to them. Placing children at the centre means ensuring their voices are heard every step of the way and opportunities are provided for young people to become genuine co-creators of the content designed for them. Both public service and news media struggle to attract the attention of young people. Yet, youth are the future of society so listening to their views is the only way of ensuring that public service and news media have a viable future. This article is an attempt to voice the views of children and young people on their relationship with news, including public service media (PSM) children's and news provision. It presents the findings of a qualitative longitudinal study with 67 British young people between the ages of 9 and 23 conducted in the period 2009–22. The study shows that, while at the ages of 9 to 10 TV was the main source of political information for children, with Newsround (BBC, 1972–) and Blue Peter (BBC1, 1958–) being the most watched and trusted programmes, young people as they grew older increasingly lost interest in watching news and current affairs on TV. The article shows that young people's reluctant engagement or, in some cases, disengagement with news and current affairs programmes is due to the growing gap between, on the one hand, the values they saw represented in TV content and the forms of presentation used, and, on the other, their own values and interests. The article questions the argument about the need to produce ‘culturally relevant’ content for young people and shows how they themselves define relevance. Young people felt the news media should devote more attention to social justice issues and to providing a platform for robust discussion on the future of their country, in particular the threats to multiculturalism and tolerance. What they saw instead on TV was a manifestation of the combative nature of politics and a representation of politics as an arena with a focus on the art of government and public affairs.