[ViridianFan]

I don’t think this has been posted already. 


https://rxtvinfo.com/2023/viewers-unhappy-at-bbc-news-channel-changes/

The part I found interesting was the last paragraph:
 


Do we know how true that is?  It would seem very wrong if UK license fee money was being spent to expand the North American news division especially as the UK is now getting much less UK focused content. 


There is a second article which seems to suggest that the BBC is focused on increasing in presence in the US. 

https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/broadcast/bbc-news-us-culture-wars/

It would explain why more and more it feels like the channels intended audience is a US audience and who so many of the talking heads are from the US. 

It feels very much like the UK viewer is going to be the one who looses out in this situation as we are told we want to access news via live pages and US audience have a channel more geared to them.

IF that is true, then I think it is appalling. I suppose the official line given would be something along the lines of 'increased funding for our US newsroom means better reporting on the US, which is particularly important in the run-up to the presidential election, and benefits our audiences in the UK'. I do kind of get their thinking - if this gamble works, it could turn out very lucrative, and may hopefully have the side-effect of giving the domestic news operation more money to play with. But - it looks tremendously bad for the BBC to be cutting jobs here and effectively giving them to a load of people Stateside. If the usual suspects get wind of this I can see it possibly becoming a minor scandal. It is a gamble - either it will work really well and make a lot of money, or it will backfire tremendously.

It could be lucrative but it does seem like a major gamble especially at a time when the voices of  those questioning the license fee seems to be getting louder each day. 

In the second article there is an interesting discussion on impartiality and being a trusted news source. It say whilst the BBC is still the most trusted news source in the UK it’s scored have dropped. It also scores well in the US, however the comment is made that it is only reaching a small amount of the population and they expect that as it reaches more there would be a rise in criticism levelled towards the BBC state side. It got me wondering whilst it could bring in additional revenue, could an increase in people questioning its impartiality state side give more weight to those questioning it here?