[interestednovice]

Interesting that it was indeed the case that Newsnight was nearly cancelled altogether. Instead it will remain but will be a much inferior product consisting of mainly debate panels. Just what we needed, more bickering!

Still, this is directly the result of the government's Licence Fee freeze, so I can hardly blame the BBC for cutting back a programme that has a relatively low viewership.

We’ve had this debate before, but in my opinion the BBC needs to be brave and axe some popular but costly programmes in order to save some more-niche but important programmes.

Those more niche programmes are basically the point of the BBC.

If the BBC ends up as just a duplicate of ITV, then why are we paying a licence fee? I have always thought it was intended to protect funding for the programmes that we may not necessarily want (in a popular sense) to see, but those that we need to or should see - such as David Attenborough documentaries - especially things that the commercial sector can’t or won’t fund.

Yes, the government’s licence fee settlement has resulted in lower funding for the BBC, requiring real-terms cuts, but how the BBC have made those cuts has been up to them. I disagree with many of their decisions.

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The problem is it isn't the problem of the freeze because they spend money in other areas which are questionable, create new roles which aren't needed rather than focusing on what they already have.

This, absolutely.

They keep schizophrenically jumping on things to create new correspondents or roles for - why the need to waste resources setting up BBC Verify when we had perfectly good BBC Monitoring and BBC Reality Check strands; why correspondents to focus on A.I. when existing technology correspondents are already covering it; why a new nebulous U.K. editor role?