But, as ever, the proof will be in the pudding. The technology does exist to provide separate live feeds for domestic viewers when national news needs more focus. Ofcom has so far said very little about the planned service, but it will be the job of the media regulator to make sure those obligations are met. The sort of stories the BBC has to do to fulfil its public purpose – from showing the impact of the Northern Ireland protocol to evidence of the cost of living crisis a year on – could be lost if the managers of the new channel are distracted by news from the US that advertisers prefer. This is not just a matter of meeting viewer demand but the BBC meeting its licence fee obligations of universal news provision for the public good. As a result, the biggest criticism of the new channel has been that licence-fee payers will be forced to subsidise a worse service. The new channel will be mainly funded by the licence fee, and there will be advertising for viewers outside the UK (although as rolling news has never really made much money, the point could be moot). Slashed budgets and the declining numbers of viewers caring whether video is carried on a channel or online has finally allowed them to have it their way. It is fair to say, as a former BBC head of television news has, that BBC number crunchers had been eyeing the duplicate costs of running two live news channels for a long time. The short-lived culture secretary-turned-TalkTV host froze the licence fee a year ago, leaving the BBC with a £400m-a-year funding gap by 2027 in a period of increasing inflation. After George Osborne’s licence fee settlement in 2010 shifted the burden of World Service news on to the BBC, the hammer blow was delivered by Nadine Dorries. Successive Conservative cuts mean funding for UK services is already 30% lower than a decade ago in real terms. Let’s be clear: the merger of two channels meant to serve two very different audiences is mainly due to cost cutting. It is a mess, but one not wholly or even mainly of the BBC’s making. The Times quoted one journalist saying: “It’s going to crash and burn like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s experiment.” Unlike in the 1990s, when the founders of the first rolling radio news service talked of having “ a pot of money and a blank sheet”, this time there is very little money and a lot of angry people. Older presenters, often women, look to be losing out, suggesting that the BBC has learned little from the equal pay furore. Few inside the BBC will talk openly about the changes, but one veteran of a domestic channel watched by 12 million people calls it a “shitshow”.
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