The Morning Service loses listeners

Popular radio broadcast side-lined

The daily radio Morning Service from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DBC) has been loyally followed by some 40,000 listeners for years on end. That is, until the DBC moved it from their FM channel to the digital channel, DAB, on 1 November – with a TV channel also carrying the service. In the course of the first week the Morning Service lost 81% of its audience. This is in spite of the fact that, as mentioned in Church News in April this year, parliament voted through a new public service bill whereby DBC promised “to place special emphasis on mediating the Danish cultural heritage, including the Christian cultural heritage”. 

 

At the same time the weekly programme, People and Faith, has been cut from an hour to a half-hour. Religious programmes are disappearing from the airwaves, and DBC programmers and journalists are being accused of both bias and ignorance by among others Joergen Carlsen, a former DBC journalist now principal of Testrup People’s High School and a member of the Ethics Council. “For years now a large number of journalists have been hopelessly ignorant about Christianity; they are untrained and narrow-minded. It’s simply a joke to think of them as ‘thought-provoking’, as they claim to be; it’s all just light entertainment.”

 

The duty to inform
Pastor Peter Hedegaard adds his weight to the criticism. “People are concerned about the nature of existence and religion and yet the DBC are taking Christianity off the radio. History doesn’t begin with the French revolution, there’s a lot more before that, not least Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian thinking.”

 

For 33 years until 2007 Mogens Hansen was one of those in charge of religious broadcasting. He too laments the decline, prompted by the ignorance of most radio and TV journalists. “There’s only one genuine professional left, Anders Laugesen. Everyone talks about religion, but all we get is people sounding off about this and that. It would be nice if we could make listeners more informed.” 

 

Managing Director of DBC, Inger Bach, herself once in charge of DBC’s Religious Affairs Dept., has a cool response: ”I don’t accept any of the criticism. We have a group of capable, dedicated journalists in our Religious Affairs department, and we have made every effort to inform listeners of the changes. The TV channel carries a text version of the hymns being sung as well as showing church art and architecture. People will get used to it.”

By Edward Broadbridge

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