[LDN]

Instead of reinstating the two-line lower-thirds for breaking news, it seems BBC News has chosen to leave the large red BREAKING/Headline permanently on screen, and instead use the ticker/flipper to provide details about the story, replacing the function previously provided by the second line of text on the main red super.

ibb.co 

While it's nice to finally see textual story information return to the screen -- especially for those places and occasions when you can only watch a news channel with the volume down! -- it seems questionable for the ticker to be used in this way. 

As we've seen each time the UK channel has opted out to cover a story, there appears to be a policy in place to never refer to any other story during a UK opt. We don't get round-ups of other stories or headlines, and the ticker -- if it's working at all - rarely shows other headlines either. The policy seems to be that if an opt out is needed to cover a UK story, they'll exclusively cover that story and pretend that nothing else is happening anywhere else. 

As a result of this, during UK opts, BBC News viewers in the UK might well be getting comprehensive coverage of an important UK story, but they might well be waiting for hours, as today, before they even see or hear another UK or international headline being mentioned on screen. 

So why is the ticker being used to show information about that one UK story -- albeit with a single additional reference to online coverage of the Covid Inquiry -- instead of providing a more useful full rundown of other important headlines around the world? 

And if the ticker was supposedly being phased out because it's too small to see on mobile screens, why on earth is it being used at all, let alone to show essential details about a story that was considered important enough to opt out for?