10-08-2023, 10:27 PM
(10-08-2023, 10:03 PM)DTV Wrote: This is completely wrong. News as a department has seen below average cuts relative to the rest of the BBC; News and Current Affairs is, by some margin, the genre the BBC spends the most on; and, even after the last decade of cuts, the pre-merger BBC News channel was the only major BBC broadcast service to have received a real terms increase in budget from 2012/13 to 2022/23.
Far from News being some poorly treated department, it is typically resented across the rest of the corporation as an executive's darling which largely gets what it wants. Sure, cuts to news do appear more apparent, but this is really just a combination of cuts to news programming being harder to cover up (no repeats) and job losses being direct (rather than simply freelancers not getting hired). Things have simply got to the point where having two news channels that can't really be cut back individually became unsustainable.
The problem is that the cuts to News could have been entirely avoidable. For example by all accounts the budget for Wimbledon is bigger than what the news channel had pre merger and alternative programmes for the slots filled by Wimbledon could be sourced at basically no cost (given a lot of coverage falls into slots typically occupied by low budget repeats).