[KatsKaravan]

To be fair, can you point to any opinions I have expressed which I didn't state were my personal view.

And, no, I won't let users be when it comes to having takes that are detached from reality. Somebody has to provide a counterbalance to certain members in this thread, otherwise it just ends up with pages of people agreeing that viewing figures have substantially decreased or that the new channel is basically World News in everything but name or that the old BBC News channel was disproportionately hit in budget cuts over the last decade or that there's a financially viable international market for a UK domestic news channel or that everything bad started on the 3rd April or any of the many other nonsense arguments that have cropped up in the last few months.

With respect DTV, you're not the opinion police. If people want to think conspiracies then they will, and no amount of grandstanding on your part will change that. At least they're fairly innocuous conspiracies! Hardly GB News material  

It may be fair to say this merged channel was always the natural destination, given the constant cuts and increased simulcasts over the last 5-10 years. So no, it's not the case that 'everything bad started on the 3rd April'. What started on 3rd April isn't even that bad, really. The presentation is rubbish, and the missing presenter situation is odd, but hopefully these are teething problems.

And that's part of the problem, the idea that there is a financially viable international market for a UK domestic news channel. We all know that and the BBC does too. But they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have to please both licence fee payers and worldwide viewers. Personally I wish the channel had become World News in everything but name.