BBC News and BBC World to merge

[DTV]

I sympathise with your position, but is it wrong to feel that surely the BBC must accept the major part of the responsibility itself? It doesn't have to cut news at all - it's still receiving billions of pounds a year from the licence fee, and it could easily afford to, and choose to, protect the spending on news and current affairs. 

If the first response to the prospect of receiving a little less money is to make significant cuts to what (I think we can agree) are the truly essential licence-fee-funded services like news, rather than looking elsewhere - maybe just one episode of EastEnders a week instead of four? - then is it really unfair to observe that maybe the major danger is in what the BBC itself is choosing to cut, and what to prioritise?

Budgets from every department and channel across the BBC have been cut, this isn't some case of BBC News being specifically targeted, rather BBC News taking its fair share of cuts and responding to them in the way they feel appropriate. BBC News cuts just seem more visible because it has the most permanent staff, one of the largest budgets and is the only department with its own channels.

The EastEnders budget is roughly half that of the BBC News Channel and, as LondonLite points out, doesn't work in the way that reducing the number of episodes by 75% would save 75% of its budget. I also imagine that there would be something of an uproar if one of the BBC's most popular shows was effectively sacrificed to save a little watched channel that is by no means the only outlet for BBC News. The BBC News channel hardly is, nor has it ever been, the jewel in the crown of BBC News.

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I think it’s a huge mistake bbc world news has been going since the early 90s, for it to disappear along with the now established presenters is purely insane.

It would be insane. That's probably why BBC World News is not disappearing. It's getting a new name and some longer presenter shifts, but it is largely unscathed by the proposals.