For decades, critics of the BBC have accused it of bias in its coverage and its failure, despite public promises, to diversify its newsroom. In 2001, its own director-general said the corporation was “hideously white,” and 21 years later Variety reported that women of color at the BBC, exhausted by fighting what they called a “broken” system, were leaving in droves. The BBC remains the most widely used news source in the U.K. but its news coverage is seen by some as “representing a mainly white, middle-class and London-centric point of view,” according to one Ofcom report. Taken together, it’s not a great look for a public broadcaster meant to reflect the British public.

It’s not surprising, then, that minority communities within the U.K. aren’t exactly the BBC’s biggest fans; a 2023 report showed that only 73 percent of Black and ethnic minority adults watched the BBC each week, compared to 90 percent of white adults. Clearly, something wasn’t working. So in late 2023 the BBC teamed up with Media Cymru, a Welsh research and development consortium, to conduct a monthslong participatory research project, gathering members of minority groups in Wales for a series of conversations about how they viewed the BBC and what it could do to win their trust back. The final report, called News for All, was published on January 27.

“When people ask me about news avoidance, I reject that term completely,” Shirish Kulkarni, a researcher at Media Cymru who led the study, told me. “If you ask people ‘are you interested in your place in the world? Do you want to understand the world?’ Everyone says yes. But if you ask ‘does status quo journalism help you do any of those things?’ They say no. And that’s a rational choice. They’re going to the shop for sense-making, I think. And there’s nothing on the shelf.”

To better understand the needs of these marginalized communities, Kulkarni and the BBC gathered a group of 15 to 20 people once a month for six months to talk about how they viewed the news in general and the BBC in particular. They were starting from a low point: according to the report, “about 90% of the participants said they don’t trust the BBC to tell the truth.”

The researchers were keenly aware of the community’s mistrust, so they took a number of steps to make participants feel comfortable: sessions were hosted in a community space rather than an office space, for example, and began with a large spread of Indian food — complete with takeaway containers so participants could bring some home. Participants were paid for their time and offered support for travel and childcare costs. Perhaps most unusually, the sessions were led by two members of the community who were trained in facilitation, Amira Hayat and Rhiannon White, while Kulkarni and his two collaborators from the BBC, researchers Hannah Clawson and Suzanne Clark, participated in the discussions.

The participants came from a range of age groups and ethnicities: nearly half were between the ages of 18 and 24, and half were of either Asian or Arab origin.

What they found was illuminating. Participants told Kulkarni and his collaborators that, first and foremost, they viewed journalism as a form of oppression that had the same impact on their lives as the police. Journalism in general, and the BBC in particular, they said, felt like an arm of the state, and almost half of them refused to pay their license fee — essentially a legal permit that allows people to watch live broadcasts and forms the backbone of the BBC’s funding — out of protest against the BBC’s journalism.

That doesn’t mean they don’t engage with the news, however; participants were incredibly news literate, Kulkarni told me, and preferred to get their news from other sources. Many people favored Al Jazeera recently, for example, because they appreciated its coverage of the war in Gaza. Often, people got their news from social media or simply word of mouth, and the majority of them were engaging with the news every day.

“If they thought the BBC or mainstream media were better, they would use them,” Kulkarni said. “They were coming because they want the BBC to be better. Because they know the importance of the BBC, and if the BBC could be a tiny little bit better for them, that would have a massive impact on their lives.”

Participants’ news literacy went beyond their understanding of the news alone; they also were incredibly aware of newsroom dynamics and expressed a desire for those to change too. “Every day there’s an editorial decision,” one participant quoted in the study said. “Who gets interviewed, how much time they’re given. The public are getting wiser now, they see the lies.”

They even talked about performance metrics; if news organizations were measuring success by number of viewers or clicks, for example, they would never be motivated to serve marginalized communities who are, by definition, unable to deliver the same kind of audience volume as established majorities.

“The narrative in the industry is ‘oh the thing with news avoidance is they just don’t understand how amazing our public interest journalism is,’” Kulkarni told me. “The thing is, they absolutely understand, the centralization of ownership, the motivations of media barons, and the lack of diversity and inclusion in newsrooms, and that is precisely why they are not engaging with journalism. Because then that plays out in the kind of coverage they see around migration, around education, and around crime. In a way, because they are marginalized, they’re hyper vigilant to the narratives in the news, because it’s existential for them.”

In later sessions, participants were asked to come up with the kinds of solutions that would earn their trust back. Among many others in the full report, participants said they wanted stories that “’flex’ depending upon how much they already know about a story and the time they have to explore an issue.” They also expressed interest in the BBC including “definitions, background on named individuals, why stories are considered important, and what value they’re going to get from them.” They were much less interested in AI. “Our group has no appetite for more, or cheaper, content if it simply repeats previous mistakes,” the report notes. They also suggested establishing journalists in residence: reporters embedded in communities like theirs, who don’t just report on the community but report on big, systemic stories from the lens of their community.

What happens next is up for debate. A spokesperson told me that the BBC will “read this report with interest and will consider its recommendations.” Regardless of whether or not the BBC makes any changes, Kulkarni said the report is free and public, and any media organization interested in better serving marginalized groups would be able to implement its recommendations.

“We’re not at all saying there’s an absolutely right way and a wrong way [to do things], but we’re hoping that this is kind of pointing the way to an interesting and novel way of engaging deeply with communities,” Kulkarni said. “If you design for the most marginalized, you get answers that work for everyone.”