[Keith]

Not that anyone’s interested but I’ve 95% tuned out. Can’t muster the energy to write a page on my thoughts because I really can’t gather them all.

As a stalwart of these forums I am totally dismayed at what’s happened and I simply don’t care. BBC News has lost its way and it’s a tragic state of affairs.

Tim Davie and his army are to blame, NOT the Tory pressure. It’s an abomination what’s happened.

They’ve f**ked it up and they knew it was coming all along.

The issue is the cuts to the BBC's funding over the last decade and the current freeze in the licence fee is why there's now a unified BBC News channel. You can't separate one from the other.

Yes, you can argue there are other courses of action that could/should have been taken to either ensure separate domestic and international channels still existed or even different formats for the unified channel. However, what has happened hasn't occured in isolation just because.

I think the following stats explain how we got to the current situation fairly well.
- (Colour) Licence fee in 2010: £145.50
- Inflation adjusted 2010 fee today: £207.38 (according to Bank of England calculator, rounded down to £145.)
- Current (colour) licence fee: £159
- Difference: 26% (rounded to nearest whole number)