[interestednovice]

This is such an typical accountant-style “line item” view, which excuses errors going to air.

The fact is it doesn’t cost more for people to do their jobs properly, and they should. It ought to be a point of professional pride.

Unfortunately, corporate leadership at the BBC is exceedingly poor and, as such, the changes have been poorly managed and have led to a combination of very low morale and loss of experienced staff. As a result, we are more likely to see errors and it’s no surprise that suddenly staff seem to be asleep at the wheel. What was once a leading global news broadcaster is now unable to produce a professional output, it’s a very sad state of affairs.

I don’t understand how two well-run channels, merged into one, have now ended up as one low-rent channel more similar to local news production standards than either of the predecessor services. Yes, some behind-the-scenes cuts have had a screen impact (such as the loss of autocue operators) but most roles still exist so the frequency of technical errors now seen can’t be explained by it.

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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).

Exactly, if funds really were running that low then the BBC should examine output costs and look to support (and prioritise) PSB output such as news.