21-02-2024, 09:02 AM
The Scottish Six has long been a hobby horse for the SNP and its activists but it does at least identify a legitimate problem. So much domestic policy is devolved that a lot of the domestic BBC news is not relevant to Scotland - but the equivalent news that IS relevant to Scotland isn’t important enough to merit covering for a U.K. wide audience. This isn’t great for Scottish democracy.
Creating an entire extra news programme on a peripheral station was never likely to sort that problem but the logistics of working opt outs into the main news programme are horrendous. The practical solution is probably just to treat Reporting Scotland as the second and equal half of a news hour (and for London to bear in mind more often that English stories often need disclaimers if they’re going to be broadcast across the U.K.).
Creating an entire extra news programme on a peripheral station was never likely to sort that problem but the logistics of working opt outs into the main news programme are horrendous. The practical solution is probably just to treat Reporting Scotland as the second and equal half of a news hour (and for London to bear in mind more often that English stories often need disclaimers if they’re going to be broadcast across the U.K.).