[Worzel]

Oh dear, that’s a failure of leadership however you look at the rest of the affair!

To be honest, if the BBC was to be under any kind of investigation, it shouldn’t be for this. It should be for things like whether it was justified in cutting the news channel or not - and Davie himself gave evidence to a Commons Select Committee where he denied the channel was closing and said it was going to be “one channel, two streams”. Meaningless buzzwords arguably deliberately designed to mislead MPs - and never interrogated by the Committee because it’s always stuff like this that gets the attention. It does all seem so much like W1A in real life!

Davie could end up being the next George Entwistle (remember him?) at this rate.

Just to add to the select committee line. To be fair, the DCMS select committee did quiz Tim Davie quite heavily about the changes to the BBC News channel in an evidence session last year around the time of the announcement about merging World News and the News channel.

Julie Elliot who was the chair raised the point that she thought that the changes in output would require a consultation by Ofcom and the BBC weren't going to ask for a watering down of the broadcast licence as well as how domestic Breaking News would be impacted with only a small live team available. John Nicolson also raised the point that World News viewers wouldn't be interested in the rainfall in Carlisle. Tim Davie couldn't explain how the streams would work or how the breaking news live team would work in any great detail.

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