Buerk, who hosts The Moral Maze on Radio 4, also said that modern television journalists spend more time “opinionising rather than finding out what the story is”.
“I think it’s really different,” he said. “I’m looking at television in particular, you know, I mean, in those days, the Nine O’Clock News had an 11 million audience.
“The Six O’Clock News had even more. So it was a shared experience. You knew that everybody in the country would have seen it.
“We didn’t have the 24 hour news cycle, which means reporters spend a lot more of their time on hotel rooftops, opinionising rather than finding out what the story is.”
He added: “I think there was a wider agenda or a wider appetite.
“If you look at the news these days, they seem to be hammering away at the same half dozen stories, while whole continents go unmentioned for month after month.”
Buerk has been at the BBC for 55 years and is the former presenter of the Nine O’Clock News.
He told The Telegraph this week that the BBC did not “pay enough attention to its diversity in terms of opinion and class” and employed too many “middle-class arts graduates”.
“It’s all very well that there are X per cent of Afro-Caribbeans or Pakistanis or Indian-ethnicity people or trans people or gay people or disabled people,” he said.
“But, when you look at it closely, they’re all young, middle-class, arts graduates from Russell Group universities.”