[DTV]

I'm not sure even pre-merger this story would have deserved this amount of attention, even less so now when you're broadcasting to the world.

Agreed. For all the concerns about whether the merged channel would end up as World News in all but name, a global News channel or a bastardised compromise of the two, it appears that what they actually went with was a secret fourth option - a channel with no real sense of what it is supposed to be doing, slowly covering a handful of seemingly randomly picked stories (an alarming number of which are basically 'and finallies'), but which is far too easily distracted by British media stories of limited relevance to domestic viewers, let alone global ones.

I stand by my view that the merger was (to a large extent) financially necessary and could have been done well, but, six months on, it's clear that it really hasn't. It's basically everything that could have been improved about the two old channels in their latter years (sometimes turned to eleven, as with the pacing), but without any of the redeeming features of either. Even the decisions that have some logic (i.e., attempting to copy Outside Source) fail to understand what made them work in the first place. It's just such a missed opportunity.